I appreciate the response, because this is actually fascinating. As much as I think America’s system is broken, it’s more to do with political spend and gerrymandering than literal centuries of aristocracy deciding it.
It mostly boils down to First Past The Post (single-representative electoral circles) IMHO - There is no such thing as Gerrymandering in countries were the matemathical method to allocate parliamentary representatives is Proportional Vote - such as The Netherlands - because all votes count the same and the party voted for or the party other people in the same area voted for makes no difference at all.
FPTP systems directly boost the number of representatives for the two major parties by quite a lot (for example, the Tories in the UK have around 60% of members of Parliament with only around 42% of votes cast) and indirectly because people switch their vote from smaller parties to “electable candidates” thus giving even more votes to larger parties which they would never get in a Proportional Vote system.
From there a ton of broader problems arise in terms of the behaviour of politicians (such as corruption) or simply not at all acting for the interests of their electorate (because people have no realistic option to replace one politician by a significantly different one, at most only by one serving the same lobbies but with a different discourse in the moral field). You even get insanelly adversarial politics (the more they’re alike in caring not economic equality and good quality of life for most people, the loudest the theatre they make around moral issues)
I also lived in The Netherlands which has Proportional Vote and its very different: even decision making tends to be all around seeking consensus (win-win solutions, if you will) rather than adversarial theatre on morals and behind-closed-doors deals on sharing the cake.
I appreciate the response, because this is actually fascinating. As much as I think America’s system is broken, it’s more to do with political spend and gerrymandering than literal centuries of aristocracy deciding it.
It mostly boils down to First Past The Post (single-representative electoral circles) IMHO - There is no such thing as Gerrymandering in countries were the matemathical method to allocate parliamentary representatives is Proportional Vote - such as The Netherlands - because all votes count the same and the party voted for or the party other people in the same area voted for makes no difference at all.
FPTP systems directly boost the number of representatives for the two major parties by quite a lot (for example, the Tories in the UK have around 60% of members of Parliament with only around 42% of votes cast) and indirectly because people switch their vote from smaller parties to “electable candidates” thus giving even more votes to larger parties which they would never get in a Proportional Vote system.
From there a ton of broader problems arise in terms of the behaviour of politicians (such as corruption) or simply not at all acting for the interests of their electorate (because people have no realistic option to replace one politician by a significantly different one, at most only by one serving the same lobbies but with a different discourse in the moral field). You even get insanelly adversarial politics (the more they’re alike in caring not economic equality and good quality of life for most people, the loudest the theatre they make around moral issues)
I also lived in The Netherlands which has Proportional Vote and its very different: even decision making tends to be all around seeking consensus (win-win solutions, if you will) rather than adversarial theatre on morals and behind-closed-doors deals on sharing the cake.