[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.