[nathan_long]

>> democracy is a less effective system because it's holding back the decision making process... seemingly very little real progress... we have... generally nothing really significant ... to complain about.

This mystifies me: people sometimes talk about legislative gridlock as though it's all bad.

Do you measure the quality of a development team by the number of lines of code they produce? Of course not. The development team does not exist to produce code; it exists to produce and maintain the best possible codebase. Refraining from writing bad code is just as important as writing good code.

You just said your country has very little to complain about. What makes you think that a "productive" legislature would make things better and not worse?

I much prefer a system where any law needs broad consensus and relatively few are passed. Dumb as I often think the U.S. government is, at the end of the day, we have police, roads, schools, etc. Not perfect, but good enough that I can live my life in peace.

Of course, a dictatorship would be extremely efficient: the leader snaps his/her fingers and things happen. The question is: efficient at what?

[lotharbot]

One of the reasons the US has a divided Congress is to induce gridlock. This was a design goal.

Remember, government is other people making rules for you. The more efficient they are at changing the rules, the riskier it is for you to do just about anything. The more efficient they are at changing the rules, the more likely they'll take an extreme position on a contentious subject.

[danudey]

But this is why a two-party system can be a liability. You artificially create an us-vs-them scenario, with the other side as the enemy, and any agreement with them on the issues is capitulation.

As a result, you end up with a scenario in which there is always one side with a majority, who are capable of doing whatever they like, and one side with a minority, who are left to scrabble for democratic scraps, pushing bills with little impact to feel as though they've accomplished something. The few bills that do pass with bipartisan support are usually so pointless or watered-down that there's little benefit to having them at all, or it's an issue important to the country as a whole (or, more specifically, their political careers), and so it's put through without appropriate debate or consideration.

With a three-or-more-party system (e.g. parliamentary democracies, such as the UK or Canada), you can end up with a result where even the 'ruling' party doesn't have a majority. This means that when they want to pass a bill, it has to be a situation where they can get the support of at least one of the other parties. While this still requires the same sort of give-and-take as a two-party system, it provides more options for bargaining. You won't approve my 'environmental impact' bill unless I approve your 'limiting access to abortion' bill? Well screw that, the other party just wants me to endorse their 'stiffer penalties for labour law violations' bill.

This seems to me to be a more efficient solution, and I've never understood why the two-party solution was the choice made for the US.

[lotharbot]

There was never an intentional move to create a "two-party" system. That's an accidental byproduct of the winner-take-all system, which tends to reduce the number of parties. But we've definitely had some time periods where there have been 3 or 4 viable parties.

But that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is the divide between the Senate (2 senators per state) and the House of Representatives (based on population), and the inclusion of techniques like the filibuster. It's harder for one party to get a majority in both House and Senate than it would be to just get a majority in a single parliament. It's even harder to get supermajorities in both. It's even harder to also get a friendly president at the same time as all of those other things. This means that there's almost never a time when one party can just ram through its whole agenda. There's almost always gridlock.

From what I've seen of single-house multi-party systems (like parliamentary democracies) there's a lot more compromise, which is a good thing, but there's also a lot less gridlock, and that's a bad thing.

It's actually a good thing that successful bills tend to be either issues the vast majority of the country agrees on, or else very watered down.

[CharlieA]

I take your point, in part, and I don't necessarily disagree with you, because by and large the system does work. But (to use your analogy) when it comes to the law-making branch of government we have this massive sprawling "codebase" and it doesn't necessarily need a lot of new code (laws) putting in place, but rather, there's a lot of cruft and old legacy stuff that maybe needs to be removed or updated, and the time it takes to get things done is just incredibly slow, which can lead to a lot of frustration for a lot of people. While on the whole that may not actually be such a bad thing, as you rightly point out ("...law needs broad consensus and relatively few are passed...") it strikes me that the attitudes of many people (even myself, on occasion) are strikingly similar to the OP's in the excerpt I highlighted wherein due to a perceived inefficiency of government (rightly or wrongly) we may come to the conclusion that the best course of action is to abandon the democratic process in favor of something which addresses these inefficiencies...which in itself leads to...well...that's the scary part... I suppose. In a game of Civilization it's not a big deal. In reality...

My only real problem with the representative system of democracy generally, is the way we have to proxy our voting authority through our political leaders. It just seems archaic and ludicrous for a region of people (sometimes many hundreds of thousands of people) to have to boil down their political ideologies to a single "best fit" candidate. Even ignoring the potential for corruption, personal motivations, hidden biases etc. you've simplified thousands of separate beliefs on an equal number of issues, social, economic, all, into ONE PERSONS' beliefs and worst of all...that person then has a legitimate claim to believe that they're representing the people.

I suppose it's the difference between a politician believing that they're a "representation" of the people of the electorate, OR a "representative" of those voters. I think most politicians consider themselves the former, and I think that's a mistake.

[philwelch]

The use of representatives isn't just because direct democracy is unfeasible, it also provides a dampening effect, and hopefully provides a foothold for experts to weigh in alongside public opinion.

[JackFr]

But it's even worse than that. Because it is seemingly unfeasible for the legislative body to write the specifics into laws, they create unelected bureaucracies to implement the specifics of broad reaching policy goals.

[noodle]

simulated war, apparently