[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.