But the difference is that the parties in the US and the UK aren't very powerful in their own regard. Trump wasn't even a member of the republican party until very recently, and he won the nomination -- and Sanders forced Clinton very far to the left before dropping out.

On the other hand, the leaders of european parties are mostly selected through opaque backroom deals and yet are very powerful (through "party discipline", another throughly undemocratic concept, all but unheard of in UK/US parties). Policy is made by these leaders (or their appointed nominees) meeting each other and negotiating a compromise, and then (except in very rare cases) every MP of the parties in this negotiation defends in the media it as a solid and credible response to the issues faced by the country (despite, often to great hilarity, the compromise being orthogonal to several very firm positions and red lines drawn by that very same politician just days before) and then votes for it.

The mechanism for this power is that few individual MP carry their own seat, they're assigned proportionally, according to the national share of votes won by the party. Party leadership wields significant influence over who runs where (especially who runs in "safe" seats), and thus who gets in. MPs who cause too much trouble will find themselves campaigning in a difficult district, or next to a more popular/well-known candidate.

Tony Blair was notorious for imposing ideological coherence from the top on the Labour party with pagers in exactly the way you are talking about: MPs were expected to keep exactly to the media line agreed by Blair and Campbell, and hide all dissent to avoid "PARTY SPLIT" headlines.

Note how the conservative party managed to campaign against itself for the Brexit referendum and has now seemingly zipped that right up again. Although the three Brexit ministers keep issuing daft announcements that have to be countermanded by the PM (this is called "cabinet collective irresponsibility").

It's worth comparing UK parliamentary elections with the regional parliament elections, which are all run on different systems with very different results.

US parties have traditionally been extremely strong. What has happened is that the US rightwing media "bubble" has taken over doctrine and thrown away the doublespeak. Trump is winning because he can say all the unpleasant things that other Republicans feel they have to dogwhistle or hint at.

True in the US, not true in the UK -- May and Corbyn had been MPs and members of their parties for years before becoming leader.

> "party discipline", another throughly undemocratic concept, all but unheard of in UK/US parties

Again, not true in the UK

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/111815...

Is that really true? Wikipedia's article on the subject says:

"Party discipline tends to be extremely strong in Westminster systems such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India...."

In the American Congress, votes are now almost entirely along party lines, which seems like more or less the same thing:

http://www.realclearscience.com/journal_club/2015/04/24/poli...

Not sure about it. Words are cheap.

If you want to get the benefit of the support and branding of a political party it seems reasonable that you should have to follow their rules. The discipline only extends so far as removing that support. That seems fair to me. Does it not to you?

Can you explain why you think it's not? I think party discipline is simply autoritarianism applied within a political party. If anything, it advertises to me that said party doesn't really believe in democratic principles.

I disagree, it's more democratic because I know the party platform is what I'm voting for. I don't have to know the individual positions of everyone.

And collective responsibility is not undemocratic in its self.

The UK for instance is sadly almost as stuck in a bipartisan world as the US, which makes change a slow and painful process (or quick and painful wrt this year's referendum!)

But of course I don't know what xenobioticants was thinking about.

In European PR systems where many parties routinely end up in parliament, the real governing is done by elites stiching up a deal between themselves and all the proportinal voting just slightly alters the barganing chips brought to the table.

The biggest case of this is Germany, which will be ruled by the grand-coalition for the forseeable future, more or less regardless of what happens at elections.

This has worked OK in countries where people mostly trust their elites. But it is still not particularly democratic.

In any place where the big parties are old and "respectable", there will be a lot of similarities between them. But even if they are identical, they still compete with each other for power.

In a PR system, they compete less intensely. Indeed in Germany, with Merkel so firmly on top, the SPD leadership seems to be evolving to maximise its power as #2 rather than trying to win outright.

That's a feature, not a bug.

> I wish we had a system like the USA.

You are missing the wood for the trees. The last thing you want in a country is an effective government that can push through it's majority agenda at the expense of the minority.

That's why EU countries are as a rule quite far ahead on the curve of progress, see: abortion, euthanasia, LGBT rights and so on.

It's also a way to keep religion out of government as much as possible, you won't see the separation between state and church in a country where the dominant political parties all have to nominally support the dominant religion.

So please, no system 'like the USA' in Dutch politics, though, you may get your wish soon enough. Personally I'd much rather have us adopt the very opposite, the Swiss system which requires a much more active electorate and a much more educated one too.

The first amendment of our Constitution separates church and state, for whatever that's worth. You might want to suggest that to Ireland. ;)

The Supreme Court threw out Arkansas's 12-week abortion law earlier this year. Two states have 20-week bans, and those are being challenged. Almost all states are at 24 weeks, and most have no mandatory counseling or waiting periods.

And on same-sex marriage: it became legal in France only shortly before Ogberfell, and and is still not legal in Germany.

Some other countries also still have this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax

And the sooner it dies out the better.

If abortion should be rare, than why not tax it.

People who say that abortion should be rare aren't saying that the procedure itself is bad. They're saying that unwanted pregnancies are bad.

I think we're all a lot better off not getting any further into the details on this.

On the whole, not really. 11 European countries constitutionally ban same-sex marriage for example, and less than half the countries offer any sort of legal recognition for same-sex couples.

Of course the problem when talking about 'Europe' is that you have a very wide spectrum of opinions. For every country that is ahead of the US on LGBT rights you have another that is very far behind.

Some country in Europe will pioneer a concept, others will follow, some faster some slower. The US usually catches on long after the concept has already become normal in a fair chunk of the EU.

As for your constitution, America gets it right on paper, but in practice God (the Christian one) is all over American politics, whereas even in Ireland it seems to be less of a day-to-day influence.

Abortion was legalized in the U.K. in 1967, abortion bans were made illegal in the US in 1973, in France and Germany in the mid 1970s.

Sure some Scandinavian country might be ahead in those issues, but if Vermont was a separate country the US still wouldn't be behind. Also, this is really a great example of why the EU is such a terrible idea.

From a purely legal perspective not in any significant ways. However from a public opinion perspective the difference is more significant. Same sex marriage has ~90% approval rating in the Netherlands compare ~55% in US. I cannot imagine that those sorts of differences don't greatly affect the day-to-day reality living as a same sex couple.

On most day-to-day reality issues (for same sex couples or anyone else) local norms are probably much more important and I can assure you there are lots of parts the United States that have 90% approval rates for same sex marriage.

So if we are discounting the legal perspective (which just as a personal opinion, I wish the US federal law was more progressive), cherry-picking public opinion to match the more progressive parts of the sample seems like the US comes out about the same.

As for how NL is 'better' than the US: It's a ridiculously small country and very densely populated so what works here would likely not work as well in places like Canada or the US, but as mentioned above I think coalition politics (het poldermodel) is an important part of making sure that minorities do not easily become the football of dominating majorities. Both large US parties would be considered right-wing here (roughly VVD), the US has no functional left which is a residue of the McCarthy years and the cold war. Somehow the US associates 'left' in politics with 'communism' and that has kept a very large chunk of the US population without representation.

In NL it is very hard to find any substantial chunk of the population without representation. We also don't jail 1% of our populace.

That said there is plenty of room for improvement, we still have corruption, racism, crime and so on at levels higher than what I'm comfortable with, and our government is excellent at wasting money, an area they are slowly improving on but in my opinion too slowly.

Europe got their through politics, US through courts. How long do you think that would take if it was left up to politicians?

Except those are controversial with Americans. I'm not seeing how the system is to blame. Making the electoral process 'more democratic' isn't going to change that. It might make things worse ...

In my view, it is the discourse that needs to be fixed first. As long as your media keeps painting everything in black and white (and it is in their interest to do so, being part of the establishment), I don't think any electoral reform is useful.

We are very good at pretending that when we get "nothing", it is a temporary inconvenience.

EU (esp. Scandinavia) has much, much more tight regulations of abortion, compared to English world, esp. Canada, which has none. As a socially conservative I consider this good.

Those proportional system compromises aren't half as bad.

The Republican Party would immediately split into at least three parties and the Democratic Party would probably follow by splitting in two not long afterward.

Do you actually mean the US political system was deliberately lain out by a mastermind with the goal of preventing the emergence of alternative parties?

Or just that the system has evolved (without design) to be hostile to minority parties?

If the latter, the word "rigged" seems misleading and inflammatory to me. If the former, where should I look to learn more about this conspiracy?

Alternatively fascist could have sided with SDP if the communist are too bad. And this time we have over 50% popularity in all of the elections in early 30's.