Natalie Wolchover:

The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.

Decius:

Sometimes the problem is with your mathematical model.

I'll say.

I don't put much stock in LiveScience. The underlying work here is nearly ten years old. Try a Google search for

"Mato Nagel" dunning

and see how many full-text copies of this article are floating about.

Then repeat the same search on Google Scholar, where you'll find that the research in question was published in 2010. Furthermore, the author works at the "Center for Nephrology and Metabolic Disorders". Nephrology is "the branch of medicine that deals with the physiology and diseases of the kidneys."

The headline would seem to be easily disproven by a line plot showing the increasing number of democracies worldwide throughout the 20th century. The Oxford American Dictionary defines flourish as "grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way". While you might argue about the health of various democracies around the world, the overall growth has been quite vigorous.

The full paper never uses the term "flourish". Wolchover, the LiveScience author, quotes David Dunning:

Very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is.

Hrm. Where have I heard that before? Oh, Howard Aiken said it:

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

He said that some time before his death in 1973; see the quote in Robert Slater's Portraits in Silicon.

Not exactly Live Science now, is it?