The biggest telltale of a confused leftist (i.e. hangs around the current conservative counter-culture) is that he is still brainwashed with the modern form of phony democracy being the ideal of free society. This contrasts with Ancient Greco-Roman [1] conception of citizenship akin to nobility and bourgeois/middle-class, with a middle/working-class of freemen sitting between the former and slaves. While not purely meritocratic, ancient democracy meant having stakes in the game. [2]
In libertarian circles, there's also the concept of market-democracy, where having stakes in the game means individuals answer better questions, and makes more accurate collective decisions . The Wisdom of Crowds (pdf) book cites plenty of examples, such as the stock-market quickly identifying who was responsible for the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster. Political commentary is mostly outside the scope of the book, particularly with the inconclusive last chapter [3].
Without a useful term, discussing this concept or anything related to the uninitiated is unnecessarily verbose, even though it is an intuitive, populist concept.
Edit: Bad democracy is unqualified civies irresponsibly voting on people or ballot initiatives. Switzerland is passable, since ordinary citizens have better opportunity to be directly involved with state matters, for better or for worse. The only accurate phrasing I've come up with is active vs. passive democracy, but that doesn't exclude mob/clique/committee rule, which countermands spontaneous order and independent decision aggregation. I'll share this on the blackandgold Matrix channel and hopefully get a non-leftist answer that I can share here.
Edit 2: Market democracy in quadrant format.
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- Athens, the progenitor of Democracy, had more in common with the Roman Republic or it's rival Sparta than modern societies or feudal Europe.
- Heinlein's Starship Troopers refines this concept on classical liberal principles.
- Shame that the author is a New Yorker suffering from TDS.
It's just "democracy". Others would call it mob rule. We'd have to agree on what "effective" means before we can agree on which qualifier should be the standard. The standard term for whatever the US and Europe supposedly lives under is Liberal Democracy, and the people who run the Liberal World Order would say that this is the most effective form of democracy. I'm sure you're also familiar with Representative Democracy but that's a broader classification than what you're looking for.
Indeed, and also lends itself to infinite meaningless semantic debates until the parties define terms.
I didn't settle on the term "effective democracy" since 'effective', like 'holistic', has a leftist and pretentious connotation in common vernacular. It most certainly isn't representative democracy, which is even worse than direct democracy. An extreme example of what I mean is Senator Armstrong's ideal of action determining policy.
It's called Based Democracy, son.