A personal anecdote which illustrates the difference between living in a place that uses choose-one voting (i.e. FPTP) to elect its representatives, and one that uses a form of proportional representation:
I was born as a citizen of both the United States and the Kingdom of Denmark, with one parent born in the US, and one born in Denmark. Since I was born in the States with Danish blood, my Danish citizenship was provisional until age 22, with a particular process being required to maintain my citizenship after that age to demonstrate sufficient connection to the country. This process is currently in its final stages.
I have had to (still am) deal with both the American Department of State and the Danish Ministry of Immigration and Integration in this process, and there’s a world of difference between my experience with the two governments. While the Danish Ministry always responds relatively promptly, with a helpful attitude, the American DoS has been slow and frustrating to work with.
I contacted the American Dept. of State in order to acquire a copy of certain documents that the Danish government needed to verify that I indeed qualify to maintain my citizenship. This request was first sent in October 2019, or 23 months (nearly 2 years!) ago, and I still have been unable to acquire a copy of this needed documentation, with no timeframe provided for when it might be available. The primary reason for this delay is precautionary measures taken in order to slow the spread of COVID-19 preventing anybody from entering the building where the records are kept.
But the Federal government didn’t even start to take precautions against Covid until March 2020, four months after I first sent the request! While such a delay isn’t surprising when dealing with the American government, there really is no excuse for such a long delay to start with. And even once the virus hit, I’m still left scratching my head.
Yeah, we want to take precautions to keep it from spreading. Yeah, it makes sense that in the first many weeks, hasty measures were taken that wouldn’t always make perfect sense. But you don’t close down a building containing vital records for a year and a half! Let a selected group of employees enter, and have them follow some set of protocols that ensures people are safe. The building is literally called the Office of Vital Records! You don’t close a building that’s capital-v Vital for such a long time just to contain the spread of Covid.
Meanwhile, everything that I needed from the Danish government, I received a reasonable and helpful response within a very quick timeframe. I don’t think I ever waited more than 10 days to receive help, and usually it was a good bit quicker than that, with my requests being responded to within the day after I sent any request.
So why is there such a big difference? Imagine that the slow, unhelpful government processes showed up overnight in Denmark, which uses proportional representation. It wouldn’t take long for some citizens to get frustrated, and for them to rally their friends to their cause. So far that’s not so different from what could happen in the US. But while the two major US parties would be so focused on a narrow set of polarized topics, with neither having any incentive to address this growing discontent among the populace (and both being able to get away with ignoring it, since the other party ignores it too), in Denmark, even if the two biggest parties ignored this discontent, the smaller parties would be able to use this discontent to win big in the next election, by promising to do something about the problem, winning them large votes away from the parties that ignore it.
This dynamic is what causes Danish government, not just in this aspect, but in almost every aspect I have seen during my time living there, to be so much more competent and pleasant to interact with than the American government: smaller parties in Denmark always make the larger parties work hard to maintain their lead, while in America, the two parties can compete on a few high-profile banner issues, and sit on their laurels and ignore everything else.
Another framing, is as a two-dimensional political spectrum. While the two-dimensional spectrum I’ve seen most often pairs “Right vs. Left” with “Authortarian vs. Liberal”, I think a more important grid would pair “Right vs. Left” with “Competent and Aligned” vs. “Incompetent and Unaligned”. For a political party, being competent and aligned takes time, energy, and money away from being able to campaign to win elections, so in the absence of sufficient pressure from voters to have aligned parties, the parties will drift towards being very incompetent and very unaligned.
Because Competence is generally orthogonal to Right vs. Left, in a two-party system the main forces from voters will be on the Right-Left axis, allowing the parties to drift towards incompetence more or less unchecked (if you doubt this, pick up an American newspaper from the past 5 years). However, in a multi-party system (I believe this also applies to Instant-runoff, despite my disdain for IRV), since there are multiple parties on both the left and the right, voters can reward competence without having to abandon their political tribe, pushing strongly against the drift towards incompetence, and instead ensuring a highly competent outcome.
(One last note: yes, I have considered whether the anecdote I give is a result of the culture or the more diverse ethnic makeup of the US compared to Denmark, and I am unconvinced by that hypothesis. Those effects, while real, are nearly trivial compared to the effects from the voting system. I have written too much here already, so I will not comment further on why this is the case)
At first glance, the obvious difference would be size. (But voting, so that the office of vital records is staffed properly and does not take years …does seem the obvious answer.)
Do not both the resources needed to run a government and the resources a government can receive in taxes grow linearly with the size of a country? Or do you have different size dynamics in mind?
(One last note: yes, I have considered whether the anecdote I give is a result of the culture or the more diverse ethnic makeup of the US compared to Denmark, and I am unconvinced by that hypothesis. Those effects, while real, are nearly trivial compared to the effects from the voting system. I have written too much here already, so I will not comment further on why this is the case)
I was thinking that ‘size dynamics’ seem like ‘a more obvious reason for delay’ than ‘diverse ethnic makeup’. Not ‘this dynamic makes a lot of sense’ but ‘this other dynamic would make more sense’.
Gotcha. My main explanation is just that the American political framework is old, having been around since the start of the modern democracy movement, and voting theory wasn’t a thing people thought about back then; that, plus the particular historical reasons many countries adopted proportional representation didn’t play out to the same degree in the US.
A personal anecdote which illustrates the difference between living in a place that uses choose-one voting (i.e. FPTP) to elect its representatives, and one that uses a form of proportional representation:
I was born as a citizen of both the United States and the Kingdom of Denmark, with one parent born in the US, and one born in Denmark. Since I was born in the States with Danish blood, my Danish citizenship was provisional until age 22, with a particular process being required to maintain my citizenship after that age to demonstrate sufficient connection to the country. This process is currently in its final stages.
I have had to (still am) deal with both the American Department of State and the Danish Ministry of Immigration and Integration in this process, and there’s a world of difference between my experience with the two governments. While the Danish Ministry always responds relatively promptly, with a helpful attitude, the American DoS has been slow and frustrating to work with.
I contacted the American Dept. of State in order to acquire a copy of certain documents that the Danish government needed to verify that I indeed qualify to maintain my citizenship. This request was first sent in October 2019, or 23 months (nearly 2 years!) ago, and I still have been unable to acquire a copy of this needed documentation, with no timeframe provided for when it might be available. The primary reason for this delay is precautionary measures taken in order to slow the spread of COVID-19 preventing anybody from entering the building where the records are kept.
But the Federal government didn’t even start to take precautions against Covid until March 2020, four months after I first sent the request! While such a delay isn’t surprising when dealing with the American government, there really is no excuse for such a long delay to start with. And even once the virus hit, I’m still left scratching my head.
Yeah, we want to take precautions to keep it from spreading. Yeah, it makes sense that in the first many weeks, hasty measures were taken that wouldn’t always make perfect sense. But you don’t close down a building containing vital records for a year and a half! Let a selected group of employees enter, and have them follow some set of protocols that ensures people are safe. The building is literally called the Office of Vital Records! You don’t close a building that’s capital-v Vital for such a long time just to contain the spread of Covid.
Meanwhile, everything that I needed from the Danish government, I received a reasonable and helpful response within a very quick timeframe. I don’t think I ever waited more than 10 days to receive help, and usually it was a good bit quicker than that, with my requests being responded to within the day after I sent any request.
So why is there such a big difference? Imagine that the slow, unhelpful government processes showed up overnight in Denmark, which uses proportional representation. It wouldn’t take long for some citizens to get frustrated, and for them to rally their friends to their cause. So far that’s not so different from what could happen in the US. But while the two major US parties would be so focused on a narrow set of polarized topics, with neither having any incentive to address this growing discontent among the populace (and both being able to get away with ignoring it, since the other party ignores it too), in Denmark, even if the two biggest parties ignored this discontent, the smaller parties would be able to use this discontent to win big in the next election, by promising to do something about the problem, winning them large votes away from the parties that ignore it.
This dynamic is what causes Danish government, not just in this aspect, but in almost every aspect I have seen during my time living there, to be so much more competent and pleasant to interact with than the American government: smaller parties in Denmark always make the larger parties work hard to maintain their lead, while in America, the two parties can compete on a few high-profile banner issues, and sit on their laurels and ignore everything else.
Another framing, is as a two-dimensional political spectrum. While the two-dimensional spectrum I’ve seen most often pairs “Right vs. Left” with “Authortarian vs. Liberal”, I think a more important grid would pair “Right vs. Left” with “Competent and Aligned” vs. “Incompetent and Unaligned”. For a political party, being competent and aligned takes time, energy, and money away from being able to campaign to win elections, so in the absence of sufficient pressure from voters to have aligned parties, the parties will drift towards being very incompetent and very unaligned.
Because Competence is generally orthogonal to Right vs. Left, in a two-party system the main forces from voters will be on the Right-Left axis, allowing the parties to drift towards incompetence more or less unchecked (if you doubt this, pick up an American newspaper from the past 5 years). However, in a multi-party system (I believe this also applies to Instant-runoff, despite my disdain for IRV), since there are multiple parties on both the left and the right, voters can reward competence without having to abandon their political tribe, pushing strongly against the drift towards incompetence, and instead ensuring a highly competent outcome.
(One last note: yes, I have considered whether the anecdote I give is a result of the culture or the more diverse ethnic makeup of the US compared to Denmark, and I am unconvinced by that hypothesis. Those effects, while real, are nearly trivial compared to the effects from the voting system. I have written too much here already, so I will not comment further on why this is the case)
At first glance, the obvious difference would be size. (But voting, so that the office of vital records is staffed properly and does not take years …does seem the obvious answer.)
Do not both the resources needed to run a government and the resources a government can receive in taxes grow linearly with the size of a country? Or do you have different size dynamics in mind?
I was thinking that ‘size dynamics’ seem like ‘a more obvious reason for delay’ than ‘diverse ethnic makeup’. Not ‘this dynamic makes a lot of sense’ but ‘this other dynamic would make more sense’.
Gotcha. My main explanation is just that the American political framework is old, having been around since the start of the modern democracy movement, and voting theory wasn’t a thing people thought about back then; that, plus the particular historical reasons many countries adopted proportional representation didn’t play out to the same degree in the US.