As a Canadian, it's always amusing to me when a European tells an American that the American political system is inferior despite American having roughly the same GDP as the entire European Union, with a fewer percentage of people below the poverty line, with 3/5ths the workforce, with half the EU's unemployment. Maybe we should be less judgmental.

Of course, the implicit "having a more left-er political spectrum is better" opinion is assumed, which is almost always the case for contra-American political claims, but in your defense, may not be the case here.

More progressive stance on abortion, higher government transfers of wealth to the poor than many Western European countries, high degree of state involvement in many industries, highest corporate tax rate (although effective tax rate is on par with Western Countries), and the only thing missing from the US to make it European style left wing is socialized health care.

>the only thing missing from the US to make it European style left wing is socialized health care

And most European countries don't even have socialized health care, just basically the UK.

France does[1], Germany does[2], and so does the whole rest of the EU. So does Russia[3]. Is there any country in Europe that doesn't?

[1] http://france.angloinfo.com/healthcare/health-system/health-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Germany#Public_i... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Russia

I think you may be confusing universal healthcare with socialized medicine, it's a common mistake.

Residents pay tax (insurance) into a common pot, and get universal healthcare. The government pitches in with contributions from the general budget. How is that not socialized healthcare?

Universal healthcare doesn't always work that way though, it's just basically the idea that every citizen is guaranteed some minimum standard of coverage. For example in Japan there's a mandate that all residents are required to have health insurance, but most people have it through their employers. It's not single payer or socialized healthcare. In many countries there's a mix of private and public and a portion of the population is covered by a system like you're talking about, like in the US with Medicare and Medicaid.

It's more about the willingness to say "we represent the poor". The more progressive US politicians will only go as low as to claim they represent the middle class, but no lower. The poor are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires anyway, right?

The closest thing to European style left is Bernie Sanders, but he's such an outlier that he's considered a commie in the US, while in Europe he'd be center-left.

I'm European, I just consider certain US politicians as more left or right wing than others.

But relatively speaking, the pattern holds true even in places with different political norms and what not. The media is disdain for people who don't agree with the academic/media/whatever narrative are vilified, they turn to candidates with some questionable views because they don't treat them terribly and it just starts spiraling out of control.

To an American it's always amusing when a European tells us our political system is unsatisfactory. Over and over and over again. Never gets old. No, really. Keep it up.

> To an American it's always amusing when a European tells us our political system is unsatisfactory.

As an American, I find it amusing the same way I find it amusing when someone points out the sky is blue, or the Earth is round.

And the Europeans are always incredulous when they learn that the infant mortality rate in the U.S.A. is correlated with the zip code.

Didn't catch the Republican debate last night eh? Unsatisfactory does not begin to describe the situation with American politics.

You have a choice of only two parties to represent a population of 310M people of diverse backgrounds. How can that possibly be anything but unsatisfactory, regardless of your origin?

> You have a choice of only two parties to represent a population of 310M people of diverse backgrounds.

That's simply not true, and a drastic oversimplification of American politics.

It is true that there are two mainstream America political parties. However, anyone is free to run as an Independent or under the banner of any other party they choose, whether that be the Green Party or the Libertarian Party. Here is an example ballot, showing that more than just Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were on the 2012 federal election ballot: http://www.sos.ms.gov/links/elections/home/tab1/GE12%20Sampl...

As you can see, the Constitution Party, Libertarian Party, Green Party, and Reform Party also appeared on the ballot.

It is true that voters seldom vote for people outside the Republican or Democratic parties. (Two notable recent exceptions are Bernie Sanders, formerly Democratic Socialist who switched to Democrat, and Joe Lieberman, Independent) Why is this? Because for the most part, people are happiest with one of those two. How's that possible? Because there's an enormous amount of political range within a party. Basically anyone can up and announce that they're a Republican at any time, and that's that. Ron Paul and John Kasich can be in the same party and nobody blinks an eye. That's why you hear expressions like 'Tea Party Republicans' or 'Blue Dog Democrats' or 'Southern Democrats'. There's a lot more variety in the party than you see in European parties and party members are free to do basically whatever they want while in office. They don't have to vote in blocs.

At the same time, Americans vote for damn near every position imaginable. Federal government is largely divorced from most people's everyday concerns; you get a vote for President/Vice-President, two Senators, and a Representative. The policies that affect the average American most are legislated and executed on a local and state level, not a federal level. States have enormous power in America politics. And take my state, for example: I get to vote for Governor, Attorney General, Lieutenant Governor, State Auditor, Secretary of State, State Treasurer, Agriculture Commissioner, State Senator, Insurance Commissioner, Public Service Commissioner, Transportation Commissioner, Supreme Court Justice, District Attorney, and House Representative. On the county level, which is also where an incredible amount of decisions are made, I elect a Supervisor, Constable, Sheriff, Justice Court Judge, Tax Collector, Tax Assessor, Chancery Clerk, Circuit Clerk, School Board Member, Superintendent of Education Coroner, and Prosecuting Attorney. And the more local you get, the less party matters at all.

There isn't a democracy problem in America: most of the most important decisions - education funding, infrastructure development, criminal laws and prosecutions, law enforcement, taxation, utility management, etc - are made on a state level or a hyperlocal city or county level. The reality is that the federal government has comparatively little to do with most people's lives, beyond getting a federal income tax return, the military, Social Security, and Medicare.

The problem is with the people.

> That's simply not true, and a drastic oversimplification of American politics.

It is in practice quite true even if it is not nominally true, and not only that it is true, but the connection between it and the particular kind of poorly-representative electoral system the US has been established by comparative study across democracies.

> There isn't a democracy problem in America

Yes, there is, largely to a very poorly representative electoral system. Lots of elections doesn't make a well-functioning democracy, that takes elections which produce governments that are effectively representative.

>Yes, there is, largely to a very poorly representative electoral system. Lots of elections doesn't make a well-functioning democracy, that takes elections which produce governments that are effectively representative.

Can you explain in what sense American government is not representative?

People freely choosing to vote for people that you don't consider to be in their best interests does not make a government unrepresentative.

There are a few factors that impact representativeness - gerrymandering and the ineligibility of felons and illegal immigrants, for instance, but all-in-all that impact is pretty minor. In particular, of course, at a local and state level, those impacts are reduced along with the scale. There's an unwarranted hyper-focus on federal government because it's the most visible and affects the most citizens, but for most people's day to day lives, it is the least important level of government.

If Americans have a divisive, gridlocked federal government that produces results nobody likes, that's the natural consequence of a divisive, gridlocked populace that doesn't know what it wants (lower taxes! more social security! balance the budget!), not un-representative government.

> Can you explain in what sense American government is not representative?

While 'Winner Takes All' is one way to do representative voting and checking that item off the list, it's one of the worst ways to be representative. CGP Grey has a series of videos on different voting systems and their pros and cons on youtube - start with this one, which goes through the ways 'winner takes all' drives towards worse representation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

Another issue that Grey doesn't mention is that electioneering in the US is so constant and expensive, that politicians can rarely afford to speak in-depth to people without money to donate. It's a subtle effect and not really corruption, but a result of having to endlessly chase the dollars in order to electioneer.

The US has a representative system, no-one's arguing against that. But is it satisfactory or unsatisfactory?

> While 'Winner Takes All' is one way to do representative voting and checking that item off the list, it's one of the worst ways to be representative.

State and local elections are often not winner takes all, but two-round voting. (Really, more than that, if you want to cheat and count the primary election and possible run-offs there.)

> Can you explain in what sense American government is not representative?

Because it produces outcomes where the distribution of power in government does not follow the distribution in the preferences of the electorate (even the distribution as expressed in voting, which is already distorted by tactical accommodation to the known features of the electoral system.)

This is problem stemming largely from the use of single-member winner-take-all elections by majority/runoff or plurality rules, as is the case for most legislative (and many other) elections, and which is compounded, at the federal level, by distribution of representation disproportionately to population (obviously in the Senate, but granularity results in significant variance in district size for House seats, as well.)

Arend Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy provides pretty good coverage of both the degree to which various modern democracies have representative government, the structural features that are associated with effective representation, and the effects that those variations in effectiveness of representation have.

> People freely choosing to vote for people that you don't consider to be in their best interests does not make a government unrepresentative.

True, but America, nevertheless, among modern democracies has a notably poorly representative government.

> There are a few factors that impact representativeness - gerrymandering and the ineligibility of felons and illegal immigrants, for instance, but all-in-all that impact is pretty minor.

Gerrymandering actually has a lot less impact on representativeness than it gets credit for (but it having any significant effect is a product of single-member, winner-take-all districts, which have a very large effect on representativeness, even outside of gerrymandering.)

> In particular, of course, at a local and state level, those impacts are reduced along with the scale.

No, the scale might be reduced, but the effects of gerrymandering and disenfranchisement, such as they are, are not reduced at local scale (and may actually be exacerbated, depending on the locale -- there are locales above and below the national average for distortion from any of those sources.)

Additionally, there are systems used at local scale (such as multiseat elections on a Vote for N system, with N winners) that are frequently used in local elections that are more hostile to effective representation than single-member, winner-take-all districts.

OTOH, the effects of unequal allocation (at least for legislative districts) are reduced at the state level.

> If Americans have a divisive, gridlocked federal government that produces results nobody likes, that's the natural consequence of a divisive, gridlocked populace that doesn't know what it wants (lower taxes! more social security! balance the budget!), not un-representative government.

Well, no, its a product of a combination of unrepresentative government and a Constitutional system deliberately made to have many veto points, which means if the distortions that effect different institutions work in different directions, the result is gridlock.

Who are we comparing with? It's difficult for me to see how American government is not necessarily more representative than the usual European/parliamentary government.

Compared with other established democracies. It may not be easy to see superficially, again, if refer you to Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.

As an American I'm always confused by this kind of statement. From what I've read of European politics it really doesn't seem that different in the rhetoric, just in how the different parties and individuals refer to themselves. The laws and systems are different, but to me the politicians are roughly the same.

Most European countries -- and most democracies in general, though there are some exceptions -- have, largely due to differences in electoral systems, more real axis of variations among visible electoral parties and farther extremes on the axes that roughly align with those in the US which are represented.

On top of that, the center in the US is pretty far to the right in European terms; the mainstream of the Republican and Democratic parties (in government, if not in the electorate) have been, I think fairly, described as, respectively, right-wing and center-right in European terms.

But I don't necessarily think that's a fair comparison. I look at it in terms of what politicians say they want to do and what they eventually do versus what the people say they want and what they accept. In the long run, the rhetoric from politicians and the effect of the resulting laws on the people seem really similar.

But as someone else pointed out elsewhere on the page, I guess it depends on how you define left and right in terms of politics.

> In the long run, the rhetoric from politicians and the effect of the resulting laws on the people seem really similar.

The space occupied by the rhetoric might be similar, but the distribution within that space is not; more significantly, the substantive policy outcomes are not similar, particularly on economic/labor/welfare issues. (Consider things like government policies on healthcare, paid sick leave, paid family/maternity/paternity leave, etc.)

I agree on the difference in distribution, but not on the desire to have those things. All those items you listed, Americans want them to. The difference is the desire to attempt to do so with little or no government involvement. The reason is because in our own short history that it is quite evident that on a national scale the government attempting to do such things almost always ends in spectacular failure. Of course, it's sold as "almost" working so, of course, more money is required to get it right this time.

In many ways, those items are being addressed on the US state level, as they should. I, for one, have all the things you list available to me. Are some more expensive then they should be? Sure, but most likely if you dig into the truth of the matter it's because of government interference.

In the end, most people want the same things regardless of their government.

Do you not consider bernie sanders left wing?

He's the leftmost US politician to be noteworthy outside the US, and in good ol' Yurop he'd be at best centre-left.

He's more right than most parties in the European Left bloc, and there's still fringe groups left of those.