An Evaluation of Democracy in the current era.
Democracy is an ancient ideological system, which unlike ancient empires, is still thriving and soaring, with no flaws. Or rather, it does have flaws, but are completely unaddressed. The democracy of the ancient Athenians and the democracies of the Western world are very diffrent; not just from who could vote in elections, as is most famously known. To have a proper evaluation of democracy for today, we must compare it to the democracies of the past, and also later see what democracy has which is weighing it down and not letting it thrive properly.
What is Democracy? It is kratos (power) to the demos (people). This power system was orginally created, and famously known, in Athens. However, unlike modern democracy, Athenian democracy was quite different at it's core.
To begin, there were no elections in Athens. Aristotle himself said "It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lottery; and as oligarchic when filled by election." (Politics: Book VI, Ch. 2) The Greeks understood that elections would allow for an oligarchy. This can be drawn from the fact that in an election, a candidate who is more well known, wealthy, socially influencial or persuasive, will usually be the candidates chosen by the people due to them having much more of a stake in the pie compared to other candidates. This, implied by Aristotle, means that elections will lead to a small minority of powerful elites ruling the nation, and therefore creating an Oligarchy, which can accelerated in elections by polarization, courrption and other forms of bias. So if ancient Greek democracy uses the lottery, what does it mean to have a "lottery" in a democracy?
Put simply, a "lottery" based democracy, atleast the one of Athens, uses a ballot where candidates are chosen completely randomly. Today that could be with a random number generator, but in Athens they used a "ballot" which stored names and then they pulled out a random option. This system can be seen as Democratic- it is power to the people, so now the people get power. This, without regulation of candidates, sounds horrible as a system, but the Athenians did have regulation on candidates. Candidates were required to have personality tests and other forms of checks to make sure they were not just charismatic, but also competant and fit for their role as a politican.
Already, we see a slight issue with modern day Western democracy - it uses elections. If utilized properly it can be used for Democracy, but does the West really follow a real Democratic structure? Whilst there is some Direct Democracy (or the modern day equivelent of ancient Greek democracy) here and there, but the system follows "indirect" democracy led by experts on politics. These experts are representatives and are voted into power with elections. This is the main foundation of Western Politics. Just like how Aristotle predicted, elections have really created an "indirect" democracy. A Democracy that is barely one.
We do already see polarization in our modern day politics which already, that is one check down for an Oligarchy. There is barely any unity amongst the Left and Right political spectrum, thanks to it being usually boiled up in a 2-party system. As for courrption, it is becoming more and more known that whilst there isn't 'direct' courrption in Western Democracies as compared to say, Eastern Europe, there is 'Lobbying'. Whilst intended to be simply a form of pressure group, it rather provides insane amounts of money. Forms of lobbying done through Super PACs and Think Tanks, are effectively buying out politicans for themselves and creating their own elite. another check for the defintion of an Oligarchy.
As for forms of bias such as selection bias based off social influence or name recognition - modern democracy is known for this too. For example, former U.S. governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, won the Californian Gubernatorial elections of 2003, by using pure name recognition as an actor. The exact same can be said for another former governor of california and former president of the United States, Ronald Reagan. With Reagan especially, he used his charisma to absolutely destroy his opponents in the 1980 and 1984 American Elections. This isn't a lone case in the Americas. Ukraine elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, from his strong name recognition, ironically some of it coming from a political movie; Boris Johnson in the UK being a TV personality before being Prime Minister, and Andrek Babiš being a billionaire before leading Czechia for a short time. These cases prove that selection bias is very real in modern day Democracy, especially if they use elections, which they all do.
Therefore, by the defition of the person who formulized the concept of politics: Artistotle, the modern world is not ruled by Democracies, but by Oligarchies. Minority governments ran by influencial people, either from name recognition or pure power and influence, have courrption in the form of lobbying, extreme polarization of the political spectrum, and two-party systems that are only 1 number off from being a Dictatorship.
So in reality, Democracy is not thriving, it clinging onto survival. What really is thriving is Oligarchical Democracy, or Managed Democracy. Not all Western countries are exactly the same, as some influence can be done on these countries to justify a "democracy" such as referendums, public assemblies and recalls. Whilst I do believe that Democracy can function with political parties, the modern "Democracy" usually has only 2, and as we've seen, leads to polarization and effectively, a two-party dictatorship. It can be broken, but it will be very hard to instate an actual Democracy, wether it compromises and imposes strict regulations on elections, or straight up abandons elections in turn for a lottery.
In Conclusion: Democracy in the current era is thriving, but only as Managed democracy. Concepts near the original idea of ancient greek Democracy or the modern verison: Direct Democracy, are suffering hard in the modern era. They do have a chance to break the stranglehold, but elections are inheritantly, without restirctions or regulation on them, will lead to a new Oligarchy replacing the old Oligarchy.