sometimes with respect to places like Singapore or China you hear arguments of the form they are democracies, it's just the democracy takes place intraparty rather than between. 1/

i don't think it works, as the fraction of the public that participates in intraparty democracy is small, and the boundaries for what is legitimately contestable are very tight. 2/

but it's an interesting question whether there aren't or couldn't be substantive democracies who institutional dissimilarity to what we expect democracies look like makes it hard for us to say-so. 3/

(again China pretty overtly makes this kind of claim, but i don't think that it's persuasive.) /fin