re: #184 wozzablog

Horse trading happens in all democracies. My main concern is that the US legislature (of the Presidents own party) managed to muff a fairly simple task of implementing the main policy goal he had - and not one which at the time was particularly unpopular in the polls - i linked a Kaiser survey at the time which gave the Public Option plan 65% approval.

I couldn’t see that sort of monumental failure happening in Britain.

This occurs for several reasons, but partly because the US system is winner-take-all, or as it ends up becoming, zero-sum. Essentially, with only two possible choices, those in the party out of power have absolutely no incentive to compromise. There is no alternative choice to the other party save them, so they know that no matter how poorly they represent their constituents or assist in governance, they have roughly 50% of the votes tied up. A complicit media will push them over, as we saw recently, especially here in the US where the media is the most powerful entity in the system. Horse trading in preferential and parliamentary systems is more frequent because there are incentives to do so, measured directly in votes.

The other reason such a failure occurred, of course, is because Democrats represent both sides of the left-right divide that occurs across party lines in other systems. In the US, Democrats are both the left and the right. And this makes passing legislation hard in a system where anywhere from a third to half of the seats belong to something outside the traditional left-right axis, ie. a political activist group that represents only a small minority of the populace. It makes it doubly hard when you consider that the US federal system is designed for inertia - large-scale reform is not encouraged.