What do protests around the world say about the value of democracy?

"I decided to come because I can't stand the corruption in Brazil. Here there is no money for hospitals and schools, but yes for stadiums," an angry Adriana da Silva, a first-time protester in a Sao Paulo demonstration, told CNN last month.

In Hong Kong, which has excellent hospitals and high levels of education - but people complain that there are no decent stadiums - first-time July 1 protester, Josephine Yam, 17, had very different reasons for taking to the streets.

"There's no genuine democracy here as there is no universal adult suffrage," Yam said. "I had to show where I stand."

Some 18,000 kilometres apart, da Silva's and Yam's concerns are worlds apart, as are their ideas of empowerment. Elections, which Yam sees as "genuine democracy", are old hat for da Silva in a country that returned to democracy in the 1980s.

The young Brazilian - like hundreds of thousands who have railed on the streets of Brazil, Turkey and Egypt against their democratically elected governments - probably also has a very different take on what "genuine democracy" looks and feels like.

Over the years, democracy has come to be seen as the freest and the most efficient form of governance, its virtues accepted as a given. Hence Hong Kong's quest for democracy would seem a logical extension of the city's free spirit and clinical efficiency. Yet democracy is actually far less popular than popularly believed, and not always as effective as it is made out to be.