[howlin]

It's worth considering how old the US version of democracy is, and how many systems came after.

Americans have a deep reverence for their personal brand, but it's worth considering they don't install their government model on countries they conquer. Japan, Iraq, Germany, etc are all Parliamentary.

[etempleton]

This often had more to do with adopting a system that has some familiarity to the conquered country. In the example of Japan, allowing an emperor as a more permanent figurehead.

[hotnfresh]

That’s not the reason that we spent the 20th century installing governments that look conspicuously unlike our own: it’s that the US model has been known to have several severe, practically irreparable flaws for more than a hundred years, among the kinds of people who study governments, and those same sorts of people had some say in how we set up new governments, and evidently not a lot of pressure on them to make those look like ours.

We can’t fix ours in-place—technically, yes, but practically, no, largely for game-theoretical reasons—so we’re stuck with, effectively, an obsolete constitution. Fortunately, those who’ve set up new states in our name haven’t been forced to install that same known-bad model, so they’ve done better.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the US model has been known to have several severe, practically irreparable flaws

It's also a different context. The problem with presidential systems is they become despots. That historically hasn't been a problem in America, because it's a big country with multiple power centers.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Japan, Iraq, Germany, etc are all Parliamentary

Not relevant. The House behaves like a parliament. It's currently hung.

[tempestn]

Except in most parliamentary systems (any that I'm aware of), this kind of impasse would trigger an election. In the US you just get unending gridlock.

[JumpCrisscross]

> his kind of impasse would trigger an election. In the US you just get unending gridlock.

True. Would not help us before November 17th, though.

Also, parliamentary democracies do fall into the trap of back-to-back snap elections. Given the current situation is likely to change within thirteen months, I'm not seeing a fundamental advantage to a parliamentary system with respect to this dynamic.

[anigbrowl]

That's fair. Israel's parliamentary system is famously dysfunctional (perhaps because they don't have a solid constitution) and systems like the UK and Japan are also moribund in many important respects, partly by design.

[kibwen]

The UK is a bad example of a parliamentary system, because it's even older than the US and even more systemically broken. Can you believe it, the US actually learned from the UK's system and didn't make all of its mistakes (though it did make some bold new mistakes).

[tempestn]

Agreed, a parliamentary system alone wouldn't fix the overall zero-sum dynamic of two parties. IMO that's why the most stable parliamentary democracies also tend to have proportional representation.

[amenhotep]

A typical characteristic of a parliamentary system is that there's a system to trigger a snap election if nobody can command the confidence of the parliament. Unless the parliament you're copying is Norway's, which apparently serves fixed four year terms no matter what, this kind of nonsense wouldn't go on for long.