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ih8sharts

The electorate still has the power to chose their representatives, but the decisions made by those representatives are molded by the rich and powerful.

funperson

How do you know this?

ih8sharts

Because as long as politicians have to raise funds to stay in office and keep power, they tend to be swayed by the people providing said funds.

Ampersand

They are also moulded by the poor and uninfluenced via voting, action, lots of small donations, etc.

The rich have no formal "hard" power over their society. Their power comes in their disproportionate ability to effect soft power. That is a worrying characteristic and a something that needs to be handled but it does not detract from the nature of politics being fundamentally democratic.

ih8sharts

A true democracy has to be publicly funded. If all candidates are provided with the same amount of money by the government to run their campaigns.
As long as politicians have to beg or make promises for donations, they will be influenced by the biggest donors.

For example. If a factory dumps toxic chemicals into the water supply of a city, the law would only permit this, if the politicians do not live in that city and get heavy funding from that factory.

MayCaesar

Is this not how republic is supposed to function? The difference between republic and democracy, in my eyes, is that in the republic the resources people possess define the decisions made by the elected officials, while in the democracy it is the individuals that do so. I think the republic is a more reasonable system, because people who contribute the most to the size of the economical size should be also able to affect its growth politically the most.

Oligarchy in my eyes is the situation where the power has been usurped by the elite, and where your political power is based not on your credibility or wealth, but on your connections in the higher circles. Something similar to what takes place in Russia nowadays, where the dictator and his closest friends have incredible amount of control over the politics, and while the dictator formally is elected by people, those elections are a farce, and a lot of people controlling the politics simply happen to be the dictator's acquaitances, rather than having been granted eligibility by the common people.

In the Roman Republic, that coined the term "republic", the seats in the senate were legally bought: one had to pay a hefty sum of money to be able to work as a senator, which assured that only the rich could dictate how the political system evolves. The idea was that the rich control a lot of resources and incidentally are very well informed of how the economy and society function, hence they should be the ones holding public offices - and Founding Fathers in the US had a similar idea in mind, albeit more refined and including a two-stage election process, as well as three independent branches of power.