Some refer to the U.S. as a managed democracy and view the U.S. in totalitarian terms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism

There are systematic measures political scientists use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_House

It's a shame that Durov can start off with "there are many studies" and not cite any of them. What?

Freedom House is funded in part by the State Department, USNED and USAID and have participated in multiple covert operations and openly biased campaigns. Check the Criticism section of the article you linked and then look into their funding.

Yes, and political scientists are aware of that. Note that much of the criticism is political: China, Russia, Iran.

It definitely favors the west but despite the bogeyman a lot of academics just want good data. It also is not rating the US especially high.

And what would happen if the rated them mich lower? They'd lose their funding and cease to exist is what.

And despite all that, most of the choices are just "red team or blue team?" anyway.

What's wrong with just red team or blue team? As long as they're both competing for your vote and not colluding, it sounds like a pretty good way of establishing what popular opinion is. They're not static. When public opinion changes, they have to adapt to maintain their competitiveness.

Even people who unthinkingly vote for the same party no matter what are just cancelled out by their counterparts and are effectively abstaining. That's helpful because they didn't vote intelligently anyway.

> What's wrong with just red team or blue team?

Because people care about different things and don't always align neatly with party policies.

Suppose I care deeply about both gun rights and abortion rights. Who do I vote for? Pluralistic systems with proportional representation are better at reflecting the values of the electorate.

> As long as they're both competing for your vote and not colluding...

Now say I want to tax the rich. That's got strong bipartisan opposition. Who do I vote for?

What's wrong with it is that I can't vote for anyone that I share some views that are important to me with, unlike in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Spain, France, Portugal, Germany, etc. I'm forced into choosing between two parties which both propose many of the same things that I oppose. Whether they are colluding or not, they're identical on many policies that many people oppose and there is no alternative.

On your second point, you assume there are an equal number of tribalists without any data on that. It's beside the point anyway.

> and not colluding

Are we sure? they are both funded by the same corporate lobbyists...

"What's wrong with only having the choice between a hamburger and a cheeseburger if both aren't actively poisoning you."

The obvious answer is, what if I want neither?

From where I'm standing, it sure looks like buying off both sides is a pretty easy/predictable way to protect the status quo.

Rather than rehash all the obvious fairness and consent of the governed talking points, which you are certainly already aware of, I'll speak to election integrity.

FPTP form of elections are both brittle and very high stakes. Begetting our insane polarization.

Switching from FPTP to approval voting would greatly improve the robustness.

Switching to proportional representation would greatly reduce the stakes.

Try expressing yourself with answering n questions with a single yes/no answer that has to apply to all at once. You can't even order a family pizza that way; no matter how you align yes/no boundaries there is huge compression loss, and a massive dependence on whoever picks the questions and the boundaries.

Its still democracy. The so called "Madisonian" strain of democracy [0].

[0]: https://youtu.be/AbFlYLHOSKU

The relentless sabotaging of majoritarian rule is entirely unrelated to the separation of powers.