Lobbying is a thing in europe also, but if politicians are too blatant about it they get voted out of office.

All americans seem to agree the problem with their government is crooked politicians. Why do people keep voting those people into office?

Most European countries have strict campaign finance limits. In the UK, no party can spend more than £19.5m on their national campaign, plus £10,000 to £16,000 for each candidate's local campaign. They're required to provide accounts and receipts for all of their campaign activities and can forfeit the election or face criminal charges if they overspend. That's chump change in American terms - the last presidential election cost about six billion dollars.

With strict campaign finance limits, lobbyists are far less influential. Candidates hardly think about fundraising, because any money raised over their spending limit is useless to them. A lobbyist might be persuasive, they might provide a lot of compelling evidence, they might make the case that a particular policy would be popular, but they can't offer a pseudo-bribe in the form of a massive campaign contribution.

It used to be like that in the US, eg see "Jimmy Carter says when he ran against Gerald Ford, he didn't raise any money" http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/feb/...

It's amazing it's got as messed up as it is. Someone really needs to fix that.

I would suggest that it's not because their crooked per se, but because getting into office requires an extraordinary fundraising and PR effort that takes all their time. With the rise of finance and technology, the systems in our modern civilization are incredibly complex and difficult to understand, and the only thing legislators know about issues is what lobbyists tell them. There are no effective lobbyists for anything that is not making someone a lot of money, because it's really hard to compete with well-paid professionals.

So even with the best of intentions, the system conspires against legislators getting an informed yet neutral viewpoint on how policy will affect the myriad systems that make up our society. As if that weren't enough the anti-intellectual streak in America tends punishes anyone who tries to bring in more nuance and public research to difficult questions.

> not because they're crooked per se

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, is it not a duck?

The end result in terms of narrow corporate interest winning out over overwhelming public sentiment is indistinguishable from bribery.

And yet the solution to each is wildly different.

The American view on this seems to largely be that the crooked politicians are the ones OTHER people elect. Since our national level laws and policy are set by representatives of much smaller localities, we can love OUR guy, and think everyone else is a no good crook.

Because the crooked politicians usually bring something back to their constituents. And people vote on their local politician.

So the US Senate is usually filled with moderate voices (since they have to appeal to millions of voters) while the House of Representatives is filled with crazies who were elected by an order of magnitude less than senators.

Then you have the incumbency effect which makes it pretty hard to lose your next election so long as you have name recognition and a gerrymandered district, unless something really crazy happens with you (sex scandal, fake-news, corruption indictments, going to prison, etc), and even then sometimes the effect is still strong enough to elect you to office before you have to be removed and have the State Governor appoint an UNELECTED replacement who will then have the incumbency effect bestowed upon themselves.

All in all, the US makes it hard to elect people who will "progress" and not just "maintain".

And don't get me started about off-year elections, special elections, primaries, voter ID laws and various other legalized voter suppression (felons, poor people, minorities), and a plethora of other ways that we use to confuse citizens about voting.

Long story short, it's because of abuse of tribalism by the two parties. I'll give you a good example: the 92 presidential debate. Ross Perot, a third party candidate got almost 19 percent of the vote! So what did the two parties do? They worked together to takeover the debates so they could keep third parties from ever getting that close again!

Then couple that with carefully crafted lies, usually based on identity politics, that encourage and foment tribalism and division, add in the corrupt primary system, among other spices like blackmail and three letter surveillance of Congress, and you get what we have.

This is why it angers me so much every time someone says "both parties are just as corrupt" and is met with a thousand "ways $theotherone is actually the bad one but $ourparty is the only one looking out for the people" and derision for even stating it out loud.

After years of pondering this issue I have come to the conclusion we need to, over multiple election cycles, focus on getting third parties and independents who are fully transparent about funding into office, and enough to take away the majority from both parties, hopefully under a coalition of some sort, which would force both parties to come to the table in a more adult like manner.

Make no mistake, all three branches of government have suffered similar corruption, but the legislative is supposed to be the closest to the people, so I think it is the place to start (well really the state congresses are)

So many of the unconstitutional things which our gov does that goes unchecked is due to both sides of Congress violating their oaths. If we had a congress worth a damn we could use them to self correct...

You get two parties naturally out of the winner-take-all system. Some European governments and other governments that got to learn from our mistakes (by forming constitutional republics later in history) have real multi-party systems, which you get much more easily with actual proportional representation.

Among the other reasons provided, there's a huge challenge the US faces that Europe doesn't seem to: a lack of choice. Our two-party system does not lend itself to voting out crooks.

Because we all disagree on who the crooked politicians are. Congress as a whole has abysmal approval ratings, but people don't vote on Congress. They vote for their individual Representative and two Senators. When you ask people about their particular representation, those approval ratings are much higher.

I often get the feeling that our best minds and potential leaders either don't go into politics, or can't survive the brutal realities and shortcomings of the current political system. So basically we are doomed to constantly repeat all of these problems until something significant changes.

Everyone who is blaming stupid voters is part of the problem. The news industry colludes with politicians and bureaucrats to ensure that voters never have a real choice. Even fake choices like Trump, Sanders, or Stein are brutalized by the press. (Trump figured out that if he inspired enough ire he could be on TV all the time: expect to see this tactic again.)

Our betters conspire at every turn to give us the choice between Coke and Pepsi. If we thirst for anything else we're welcome to move.