I learned everything about democracy in the free online course offered by Stanford University called Democratic Development that ran Oct-Dec 2013. Sadly, it is no longer offered, but they do have other courses that are similar.
https://www.coursera.org/course/democraticdev
For ten weeks I took notes and compared everything I learned with everything I was seeing in our government on both a provincial and federal levels.
To understate it, I was shocked, appalled, saddened, disheartened, insulted, and angry by the sheer incompetence of these elected individuals to manage such a simple task as doing what’s best for the people and the country.
Instead, they chose to serve corporations, rather than the people who pay their salaries and pensions. They chose venality and corruption over humanity and environment and the government watchdogs didn’t even attempt to bark or whimper to warn us. Neither did they fight for us and still aren’t.
What I learned, I broke down into the weeks and turned it into a book called Crash Course in Democracy.
- Week 1 & 2: Democracy & Legitimacy
- Week 3: Consolidation & Culture
- Week 4: Economics & Society
- Week 5: Democratic Transition
- Week 6: Constitutional Design
- Week 7: Electoral Systems
- Week 8: Ethnicity & Federalism
- Week 9: Bad governance
- Week 10: Future of Democracy
