There is the ability of the population to organize and vote out and and all corrupt influence. Usually the citzenry is kept down via media and culture, but as several revolutions have shown, the old culture can get thrown out hard and fast, if the population has enough.

I believe the time of revolutions is actually gone. We've reached a point where the comfort we're enjoying in the west is baasically preventing revolutionary change. Because even though there might be things you dont like about the system you are in, overall, with social security, a health care system that mostly works (sorry USA, I am not talking about you, death penalty and all) vmost people prefer the status quo over whatever revolution you might imagine.

You’re undermining your point by calling it “supposedly”. You’re otherwise not wrong, though.

Well no true Scotsman and so on.

Even in old and established democracies, there's usually a large gap between what is said of the democracy, and what the democracy actually is and does.

That was my cynism. Democracy seems to be used as a wildcard to say "we are the good people" awfully lot recently, which gets my attention.

Yeah, but when your argument is that $BAD_THING still occurs in a democracy (which it certainly does), then it doesn’t help if you weaken that to a “supposed” democracy, because then the counterargument is that it wouldn’t happen in a real democracy. Whereas your aim is to argue that (real) democracy isn’t a panacea.

Point taken. Thanks for correcting me and actually taking the time to understand what I was really trying to say. And thanks for the very appropriate word suggestion. "democracy isn’t a panacea" is indeed a very concise way of stating what I wanted to say.

The comment you replied to said the opposite. They said:

> You need a rule of law, to tame corruption and no non-democracy has that.

As far as I can tell, that implies the only combination that's impossible is non-democracy and non-corruption. Ie all non-democracies are corrupt, but some democracies might also be corrupt.

Btw, I don't think that's even true: British ruled Hong Kong had rule of law, but no democracy.

However statistically, there seems to be at least a weak correlation (negative) between corruption and democracy.

Without democracy the rule of law itself is corrupt.

What definitions of democracy, rule of law and corruption are you using here?

As long as contracts are being upheld, and court decisions are speedy and predictable, and public officials don't enrich themselves, that counts as low / no corruption, doesn't it?

Democracy might help with that ideal, but it's by no means strictly necessary.

Rule of law in a non-democratic polity inherently benefits its rulers more than other citizens. That is legally-enforced corruption.

What definition of corruption are you using here?

As far as I can tell, an absolute monarchy that is run for the benefit of the ruler can still have rule of law and low corruption.

As an alternate history example, take Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore, but make him king and increase his salary to 1 billion SGD per year (instead of 1 million SGD per year). Change nothing else.

They would still be one of the least corrupt countries on earth, and have a judiciary that enforces the rule of law.

> Rule of law in a non-democratic polity inherently benefits its rulers more than other citizens.

That can and does happen in democracies, too.

That's no different than if the president of the US used his power to acquire money. The only difference is that in Singapore the law itself has been corrupted to allow it.

Corruption, and even corrupt laws, exist in democracies too, but in a non-democracy all laws are inherently corrupt. Non-democracies have no legitimate basis for even having laws.

What makes democracies magically more legitimate?

Can you elaborate? To me this makes no sense whatsoever, and I can easily provide a counter example. Islam is not democratic in the Western sense, yet its laws curb corruption.

Democracy leads to better government in general, which leads to reduced corruption. People in Islamic countries accurately think their countries are corrupt: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022

Correlation vs causation. Those Islamic countries are still facing occupation especially from post WWI mandates like Sykes Picot and Balfour, and we see first hand the interest of "democratic" countries to keep things that way to ensure their superiority by force. They are not letting things take their natural course.