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Comment by hash872 | Hacker News Reader

>The only way to have a sustainable government is to have strong checks and balances and putting multiple factions with different interests against one another

Completely American myopic POV. Stable, healthy democracies that are unicameral parliamentary systems include Norway, New Zealand, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Lithuania, Portugal, and Sweden. (Most of those countries don't have strong judicial review either. Or federalism). That's without even getting into bicameral countries where the upper house is actually a lot weaker/just for show.

You don't have to separate the executive & the head of state, and you don't need to have checks & balances- that's propaganda for presidential systems. In fact I'd say the opposite is true- it's the countries with the checks & balances (by having a separately elected legislature and president) that are much more unstable and prone to autocracy. See Juan Linz on the Perils of Presidentialism

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Look at all those nations you listed that are very homogeneous. I want a nation with significant culture tradition differences listed that is like that. American exceptionalist is mostly BS but we do have some ways that we are very unique as a nation and that is how many different kinds of major cultures we have hanging out in US. People handwave the US as all the same but that is very much not the case. Even for as good as American indoctrination is, nothing is gonna change that living in Montana is nothing like living in Florida. What rural urban even means in both states is so different. And we've been this heterogeneous.

I'm willing to accept your premise, but I want an example where there isn't one overwhelmingly dominant culture. I'll accept 2 equally dominant cultures.

Canada is bicameral but with a dysfunctional senate, meaning that it's effectively a unicameral system - and it's a highly diverse country.

>nothing is gonna change that living in Montana is nothing like living in Florida

The problem with this argument is that Montana and Florida vote for the same political party, and then their representatives generally vote the same way once in Congress

I don’t think that necessarily follows; you could argue that rather it’s because states are so different that the best (national) strategy is to have a broad uniform national platform that can appeal to the most voters. Our political (electorally and procedurally) system does not favor having a multitude of regionally distinct parties.

>Our political (electorally and procedurally) system does not favor having a multitude of regionally distinct parties

We use FPTP, which famously does favor having regionally distinct parties. Smaller parties can get outsized seats in the legislature by running up the vote in just a few districts, whereas if they had the same number of voters nationally but were spread out they'd get 0 seats. If you looked at all of the electoral systems globally and said 'pick the 1 that favors regionally distinct parties the most', it'd be FPTP.

In the UK which also uses FPTP the Lib Dems got 11.5% of the vote nationally and 11 seats in the last election. The SNP got 3.8% of the vote and 48 seats

It's not just homogeneity, they are also tiny. I didn't check all of them but I would guess Portugal is probably the biggest of those, with about 10 million people or 1/30 of the population of the US.

> Look at all those nations you listed that are very homogeneous.

New Zealand isn't.

25% of people living in NZ were not born in NZ. Add to that, NZ was founded out of an agreement between the British Crown and some, not all, of the Iwi (indigenous tribes) that already lived there.

Tell me that NZ is a homogeneous place with no cultural or political divisions that make working together tricky, go on.

Comparing tiny countries at the edge of Europe and the edge of the world with the the US as super-power is a weakness.

Every country has adopted American Republicanism with a clearly defined and written constitution that has some form of separation of powers. None of these, for example, allow the PM to act as an absolute dictator without some form of emergency. The difference is simply in whether the president has an independent mandate from the parliament or not.

> Every country has adopted American Republicanism with a clearly defined and written constitution that has some form of separation of powers.

the UK has none of this and its current system of government predates the US

The modern UK state has superficial resemblances - primarily in a shiny ceremonies with colonial era Britain,

the franchise widened and there have been some minor tweaks (e.g. devolution), but the fundamental system has remained essentially unchanged since the Civil War

The UK, Israel, Canada, and New Zealand all don't have written constitutions. 'None of these, for example, allow the PM to act as an absolute dictator' is not an example of the separation of powers, that's not what that phrase means at all

Canada may not have a singular written document called "constitution", but it has the Constitution Act, the Canada Act, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, so I'd argue that it's still mostly written.

I mean, why not go full bore and do the Singaporean system? An effective dictatorship? It's a great example of a stable, healthy system (until it isn't).

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