User:American Lautaro/Choose an Article

Article Selection
Please list articles that you're considering for your Wikipedia assignment below. Begin to critique these articles and find relevant sources.

Option 1

 * Article title
 * Representative Democracy/Government


 * Article Evaluation
 * I actually quite like the lead of this article, especially the first paragraph. It is very concise and articulates the key ideas of representative government. The second paragraph I like a bit less, it feels more scattered and just mentions random variations on Representative government and doesn't give an overview of the rest of the article.
 * The content of the article could definitely use work. There is very little description of what is essential to a system that is considered a representative democracy, and instead the article discusses other parts that representative governments often have (supreme court, bicameral legislatures). Additionally, the discussion of the history seems decently accurate but is less than comprehensive. There's also a weird Representation per se section which basically should be part of criticism section but isn't. The criticism section is okay, but it's strange how large it is compared to the rest of the article.
 * I think the article is fairly neutral. I would say that there is more coverage of criticisms than strengths/defenses representative government but I don't know if that's really a problem.
 * The biggest thing that bothers me about the sources is that almost all of them are historical and very few of them are theoretical. Meaning, they are all descriptions of governments that exist, and historical pieces of what they are, but there aren't any sources that attempt to knit all these things together into one coherent theory. I think this is probably causing the scattered feel of the article as a whole.
 * The article is fairly easy to read sentence by sentence, but I do not like the overall organization. History section is good and can stay, but the per se section should be included in criticism and I don't know why the only other section is something as limited as "powers of the representatives".
 * The Talk pages are a bit of a mess and don't seem to have any real dialogue going on. Just some people complaining and clearly making changes based on their complaints. The one interesting thing I found is people asking whether "representative democracy" should just be merged with "Republic". I don't know how I feel about this. I feel instinctively that representative democracy is worth keeping as a separate page, but I'm not totally sure why I believe this. I may talk to Professor Landemore about this.

Sources

I definitely think I want to use Bernard Manin's "The Principles of Representative Government" to enhance this article. I think it could contribute a lot to discussion of some fundamental principles of the type of government, and some contributions to the history section. I could also use Robert Dahl's Polyarchy to present a competing theory of what is essential to Representative Government, as well as Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. I think the criticism section could also be improved by some discussion of Landemore's "Open Democracy", Van Reybrouck's "Against Elections" or Brennan's "Against Democracy", but I want to focus first and foremost on fixing the key parts of the article before moving on to the criticism section.

I will need to find more sources that aim to get at what the heart of representative government/democracy is.

Option 2

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Option 3

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Option 4

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Option 5

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