[bumby]

I don't think it's fair that you were downvoted, at least without that person elaborating on why.

I would tend to agree that larger, more pluralistic societies may have a larger downside to the ability to rapidly changing their laws. As one group gets within power, they have the ability to make lots of changes, only to be upset by the next group that ascends to power. The U.S. has a history of voting out the current party in power and that constant whipsawing of policy might be a recipe for instability.

[yencabulator]

> The U.S. has a history of voting out the current party in power and that constant whipsawing of policy might be a recipe for instability.

That's largely a US two-party thing. Elsewhere, there's not as much a singular "party in power", and they all need to compromise and tamper their more radical agendas to gain the votes needed.

[bumby]

I don't know if I'd say there's a 'singular party in power' in the US either. It seems pretty common to have, for example, the White House governed by one party and the House by another.

I wonder, too, if it's part of the primary voting process.

We did away with the people in smoke-filled rooms selecting candidates, which seems great. But it also creates more polarized candidates which seems to constantly alienate voters.

[yencabulator]

> I don't know if I'd say there's a 'singular party in power' in the US either. It seems pretty common to have, for example, the White House governed by one party and the House by another.

For each electable organization, in a two-party system, one of the parties is always in power. The different organizations in the US government (president/senate/house) are more like stages of decisionmaking with intricate interplay. They can be ruled by different parties, but any change of power within one of those organizations is always a full flip-flop within that "stage".

Contrast that to a multi-party system, where such an organization might have power split in ratios like 6:5:3:2. The party with representation of 6 still needs to cooperate with at least two of the others. Even if they lose votes and the 6:5 flips to 4:7, cooperating with the other parties tempers the rule of the new rising party, 4+3 is 7 and all that.

This means the system is much more likely to evolve into the parties making deals with each other and compromising, as opposed to the flip-flop between opinions A and B.