Comments by "Luredreier" (@Luredreier) on "Louis Rossmann"
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@MrBearyMcBearface All political systems have issues, and the anglophone world isn't worst by any means, but look up the democracy index and you'll see that certain nations are doing better then others.
And yes, I live in one of the countries that's not listed as a flawed democracy there.
It might seem like arrogance, but that's really not what it's all about.
There's traits of my own countrys democracy that I'm fully aware wouldn't work in a lot of other countries and that might even be considered as being problematic.
But for better and worse the description that Jan Bruun Andersen used to describe democracy just doesn't apply here for a number of reasons.
Among other things we vary between having two and three power blocks vying for power here, so if nothing else we got at least 3 wolves.
But what's more is that our politicians genuinely are trying to do their best for the nation (not just my view but the overall view in my country), so they're more sheepherd dogs then wolves really...
And they're willing to put down their weapons and come together across the politician spectrum in order to deal with issues if needed, they offer multiple different nuanced options to the voters to pick between with a compromise based on the relative power of the parties usually being the end result etc.
Our system don't have gerrymandering or filibustering or wasted votes in some regions due to them not being in "swing states" or for one of the two biggest parties.
It does have other issues like being overly complicated though and can be tough to understand for the individual voters with representatives sometimes being voted in from locations other then where their voters are and it being somewhat unpredictable exactly what representatives ends up in our parliament since our system is based more around parties then individual representatives.
And like the US we also have different weighting of the voting power of the individual voter based on location although through different mechanisms.
But it does all make sense if you take your time to understand it.
And both parties with strong support in individual locations that's unpopular elsewhere in the country and parties that have a broader appeal without any single stronghold can get representation and both small and big parties can get into the parliament.
Meaning that many different points of views are represented there and in the public debate.
Our system is also based around the idea of negotiations being the main source of power for the politicians so sometimes the big parties make deals that's at odds with the values of their own coalition partners because they think that's in the nations best interest (even if I as a voter for one of those smaller parties might disagree) and other times us voters for said smaller parties can switch to a different small party with similar values to our original party in order to punish their coalition partners, similar to how voters in the middle usually play a big role in tipping the scale in for instance US elections in said swing states without us having to completely switch to a party we disagree with.
In short, our representatives are held responsible for their actions as parties instead of individuals.
Parties negotiate for power based on their values on an individual case by case basis meaning that a party program actually matters with some parties overlapping with some other parties in certain areas but in other areas they may have more in common with parties in a different power block entirely, and due to the negotiations they can actually get results if there's a majority in the parliament for those values (for instance a minority supporting that stance within a big party + enough smaller parties supporting the idea or a opposition party supporting it etc).
Yes, there are issues like horse trading happening, where a party might agree to do something they kind of disagree with in order to get political support for something they care more about etc.
But on the whole I feel like the system works fairly well with very little corruption or other failures of the democratic process.
While it does happen that big parties might force through policies that the majority of the population disagree it's a rare occurence and one that we as a people have ample opportunity to respond to in an orderly fashion.
That said, no system is perfect, and I'm sure there's elements of other systems, including the US one that we can learn from.
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