[grosun]

Definitely agreed re. the inflexibility of the US system, but "Europe" contains a multiplicity of different parliamentary systems.

The UK for instance is sadly almost as stuck in a bipartisan world as the US, which makes change a slow and painful process (or quick and painful wrt this year's referendum!)

[Finbarr]

That's true for the Westminster elections but Scotland has a proportional representation system for its devolved parliament.

[xenobioticants]

Yes, but most of the mainland countries have multi-party systems. Hell, the parliament of the Netherlands at one point consisted of 16(!) parties.

[gpvos]

17; that was in 1918. They quickly increased the electoral threshold to 75% of a seat then. Then, in 1933 when there were 14 parties in parliament again, they increased it to 100%. After that, it has always hovered around 10 parties, and it's still one of the lowest electoral thresholds in the world; most countries have it at 5%-10% of the total vote.

[tremon]

To put that in context: that is one party per million residents.

[rvense]

When you put it like that, it doesn't really sound like that many parties...

[kriro]

To me it actually sounds like more. That would mean about 324 parties in the USA.

[bobwaycott]

I like the sound of that.

[gpvos]

When that happened, there were fewer residents, so it was more like one party per half million.

[tremon]

Ah, I thought the GP was referring to when the LPF split into individual fractions.

[gpvos]

If I count correctly, the 2003-2006 Tweede Kamer had 9 party fractions in it at the start and had 5 split-off groups, so there were 14 fractions in the end. Maybe there were more somewhere in the meantime?

But of course I don't know what xenobioticants was thinking about.