Lobbying is an essential and legitimate part of every democracy. Although it often has negative connotations, the process serves a very important role in the input of policy decisions. In the US, lobbying is constitutionally protected, without which citizens would have no guaranteed way to communicate with elected officials.

Your assertion that you and others live in democracies without such a process is false. Moreover your implication that lobbying is wholly negative and unique to the American democratic system undermines your position and demonstrates what appears to be a bias against the United States in general rather than an honest critique of the way lobbying is conducted in that country.

> In the US, lobbying is constitutionally protected, without which citizens would have no guaranteed way to communicate with elected officials.

Yet de-facto in the day-to-day it is not you-and-me average citizens lobbying at the highest level but HugeCorps because they have the connections and means to pay the right lobbyists that actual average citizens could never afford...

And the very word itself already has a bad connotation. It is not "democratizing" or "participating", it is "lobbying" and nobody associates a positive, generally beneficial democratic process with that.

I don't want to argue for lobbying, which can get pretty sickening at times, but I suspect other major democracies just aren't as blatant. How does your democracy remove corporate bribes from the equation? How do people, in aggregate, push specific issues with their legislators?

>How does your democracy remove corporate bribes from the equation? How do people, in aggregate, push specific issues with their legislators?

By voting for all issues directly, like it's done here in switzerland.

Other systems where you vote people into office to do the actual decision making for you can hardly be called democracies in comparison.

And then do coalitions form to influence the popular opinion of specific things that might be beneficial to them?

In many US states, they allow ballot measures, but they are often worse than the options that would come out of the legislature because of the free for all nature of advertising for them and the general public's lack of knowledge of the details of the proposal. They do, however, allow issues such as gay marriage/pot to come up if it's too controversial for the legislature.

All issues? Even obscure, or technical laws? I'd love to hear more about how that works out. Certainly, the parliamentary system in Canada is a mixed bag.

Absolutely. The claim that the form of government in the United States is a "democracy" is one of the most impressive propaganda successes I've seen.

Switzerland has no requirement that political donations be reported, unlike the us. US states have referendums all the time.

Agreed, the American lobbying system makes even an Eastern European country look more democratic, because there, when people get caught "lobbying" like this with money, they are actually accused of corruption. In US it's all legal and plentiful.

In all honesty: such a place exists?

Possibly not. Here in NZ lobbying goes on, and companies get named and shamed periodically, but while corruption exists (Dotcom case running close to the line with 1 or 2 MPs) it is very low by (the abysmal) international standards. Low corruption countries exists. I should really get a better link, but here is some info http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_New_Zealand

Yet another reason I want to move to NZ.

FYI, the European Union has a similar model (and in many aspects much worse because unlike in the US there are virtually no rules and no transparency), and more and more power is being transferred from national governments to it.