Correct. Back in 2006 Pakistan was not a democracy.
When we believe in systems, then we can blind ourselves into thinking a system (often that is: our system) is best, better than the rest.
But you have to go stand inside each system to understand that system. You cannot stand outside a system and then judge it.
Take, for instance, China with its one-party system. That is of course fascist in setup, but it also means that the one party is responsible for all. In this one-party system, one cannot point to the other party and lay the blame at their feet. So, when the population is upset, then the one party is the responsible party to do something about the set up.
In a nation with five parties, it is not very helpful to blame all other four parties for the troubles we're in, simply because a party has to cooperate with at least one other party to form the majority.
Point is that each system has its own pluses and minuses, yet when we compare them with one another for one specific segment, how the poor are treated, then we can see which ones push the poor down more than other voting systems.
For me, when I did this research in 2006, the big surprise was how that single empowered president in a nation with proportional voting could still push the poor way down, not giving the poor all that much access to the economic benefits of the nation. As you can see, that is not true for all nations with that setup, but definitively this category contains the worst of the worst, just like the district-voting column contains the worst of the worst.
So, it is not just proportional voting that is helpful, but also the larger setup of powers (one house or two houses, having a president or not).
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Personally, I hate dictatorships and fascism (whether socialist fascism or right-wing fascism). But when a dictatorship is built on socialist ideals, then of course we will see how that leads to results that portray those socialist ideals. Nevertheless, capitalist nations will always do better than communist nations (China today is a capitalist nation, not a communist nation). The question then next is how to organize the capitalist nations so the poor are not dirt poor.
Thank you for your reply. As always, I appreciate your replies, Bob.
