Dratsab:

 

tdgeek: But democracy is an election by the people, different countries may have differing beliefs, but that is their culture, its not a democratic thing. 

 

This view is extremely simplistic and this simplicity makes the view incorrect. You need to expand things out to come to a more accurate view, like Handle9 has done.

 

Handle9: To have an effective democracy you need to have more than just a regular vote. To effectively inform the electorate you need a free Press. You need to have free speech to allow dissent. You can't have a secret police who suppresses all dissidents.

If all you is a regular vote you just have an autocracy masquerading as a democracy. A true democracy allows other candidates to put forward their point of view. An autocracy doesn't.

 

And you also have to have free voting with booths that aren't closely monitored by FSB agents.

 

Those who think Russia is a democracy, rather than an autocracy need to read up a little. Here's a partial list of suspicious deaths under Putin - read through the links as well. Here's an article about Russia's human rights crackdown, it 2 years old but still very relevant and, again, has some interesting links - especially in relation to the "blogger law". There are literally hundreds of thousands more informative links.

 

As for populism: when you control the state, when you control the media, when you control voting, when you [to a large degree] control dissention* through extreme violence - it becomes very easy to become 'wildly popular'.

 

EDIT: *I'm including views/speech/writing from opposition political parties in the term 'dissention'.

 

By that notion the USA has not been a democracy for very long if at all considering all the information that has come to light about the CIA influencing the media and elections. 

Also if we are going to jump into conspiracy theory's lets analyse this one (PDF file)