[3131s]

> democratic accountability

That's so far from what exists now in the US, it's doubtful that it's an inherent factor in our government's dysfunction.

There are many governments that aren't totally useless, so if you're looking at the US and thinking that we can't do any better, that shows a serious lack of imagination and perspective.

[wutbrodo]

This is definitely not true. A huge factor in govt inefficiency is that nonpartisan competence is completely irrelevant to most voters, who process policies based on what partisan hackery they pattern-match to most easily. This means govt institutions get jerked around by bizarre constraints and lack of constraints that can be traced back to the fact that they're ultimately accountable to voters.

[throwaway2048]

The USA sure seems to have a lot of mysterious problems that people throw up their hands as utterly unfixable, that no other country in the world does.

[wutbrodo]

Because we're a massive, layered,diverse federal system. It's blindingly ignorant to suggest that the US has a literally uniquely dysfunctional government: other countries with categorically similar levels of diversity and scale (India, Brazil) face many of the same problems. And polities that have these characteristics in part face these problems in proportion: the EU is another source of signal here.

European govt's stability and relatively cohesive civic cultures come after centuries of world-spanning bloodbaths, genocides and ethnic cleansing to reach the status quo of relatively tiny, relatively ethnically homogeneous states. And there are plenty of dark sides to this cohesion as well.