Leading questions:
Representative vs Direct Democracy?
Unitary or Federal?
Presidential or Parliamentary?
How much separations of powers should there be? In presidential systems, such as the United States of America, there is often deadlock between the executive and legislature. In parliamentary systems, the head of government is elected by legislature, therefore, there is practically no deadlock as long as theres is majority support of the executive in the legislature (although, there can still be courts to determine constitutionality of policiss). Would you prefer more checks and balances, but can also result in more deadlock, or a government more easily able to enact policies, for better or for worse?
Electoral method? FPTP? Two-Round? Ranked-Choice/Single-Transferable Vote? What about legislature? Should there be local districts? Single or Multi member districts? Proportional-representation based on votes for a party? If so, how should the party-lists be determined?
Should anti-democratic parties be banned? Or should all parties be allowed to compete in elections, regardless of ideology? In Germany, they practice what's called "Defensive Democracy" which bans any political parties (and their successors) that are anti-democratic. Some of banned political parties include the nazi party.
How easy or difficult should the constitution br allowed to be changed? Majority support or some type of supermajority support?
Should we really elect officials, or randomly select them via sortition?
These are just some topics to think about, you don't have to answer all of them.
Edit: Clarified some things
I’m genuinely interested how Napoleon 3 used proxies.
My thinking is something the lines of:
In democracies, demagogues don’t get truly dangerous until they gain some form of state power. They used that little bit of state power to both fund their allies (state capture for capitalists, government hand outs for the people) and undermine their enemies (breaking down/stymieing democratic institutions)
Eventually, they accrue enough state power to take over the state, either internally (think putin, erdogan) or via an old fashion coup / fake crisis (hitler and erdogan again)
In my mind that real power is necessary to overthrow democracies. I have trouble finding good instances of demagogues putting themselves in a situation where their proxy has more real power than them.
I’d appreciate some examples that undermine that logic.
Note: I’m excluding cases of real popular revolt. I.e. you have more than 50% of population’s support.
That's what Napoléon 3 did: he was the proxy. From my memories, conservative (royalist I think) used Napoléon as a proxy to take the president seat because he was not well known, he was from napoleon family, and they thought he was an idiot they could easily manipulate or force to do their job. I don't remember the next part well, but Napoléon 3 played the game until he could make a coup to take the power for himself. Wikipedia should have the informations.
France third republic was a political mess. It was oscillating between democracy and monarchy. Napoleon obviously gathered population support, but it wasn't a revolution still, he merely took the power and forced the parliament to give him the power iirc, because the military would rather support him than monarchy.
Okay. That tracks. I remember him mumbling into the presidency and then just taking over.
So, my logic of proxies being a bad idea, because the proxy will double cross you, still holds. However, despite that, people are still dumb enough to push a proxy forward. And that proxy can turn out to be demagogue as well.
Fair critique.