Good reply yet again, Benjamin.
The United States is an Anglo nation, and Anglo nations are indeed holding on to the winner-take-all version of democracy with quite some zeal.
One explanation is the success rate of domination. Where a single dictatorship can be extremely powerful, having two empowered parties only can still closely mimic the strength of that singular state (while the diversity allows for faster exploration of possibilities, particularly when replicated 50 times).
As you can imagine having four parties is already a more complex outcome, more diverse at heart, while twelve distinct parties will definitively be harder to turn into an extremely powerful (!) nation. The word that comes to mind is indeed domination or hegemony.
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Winning is addictive, and the system of winner-take-all can reinforce that (particularly for the winners and the occasional losers, not for the folks that always lose). The US has a dominant culture, and that is perhaps a better word than individualistic, because the word individualistic is not that applicable to the losers in American society (of which there are many).
I hope you can see that I am not saying you are incorrect, but that you made a very large part of the population invisible in your cultural explanation. Many people have nothing left but their own individual self and are not happy about it, would not call that their cultural identity, their force. The US does not rank in top in happiest nations (far from).
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One Anglo nation that changed its two-party system is New Zealand. They changed it in 1996. One fascinating fact is that the number of female representatives jumped from a little over one-in-five to a little under one-in-three in that single first new election. Astonishing. Today, in New Zealand two-out-of-five representatives are female.
Why did New Zealand make this step? Great dissatisfaction with their politicians (I hope this sounds familiar). Naturally, education is part of the explanation. Those not in the know will not desire what they do not know. IN New Zealand knowledge was available about other systems at a substantial level, and understood at a substantial level.
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Fun that you are from Canada, because the situation is quite distinct. Canada has a combination of Anglo and Francophone realities (including at the legal level). It’s voting system is winner-take-all as well, but there are fewer levels. Statelings vote for three layers: President, Senate and House, whereas Canadians vote for two Federal levels. This reduces the conflict between a person’s three votes to just two of his or her votes.
There are also four/five parties in Canada. This makes 3D moves more possible, and I would use the word active instead of reactive. Naturally, having the US as neighbor while stretched thin along a tremendously long strip of land oneself, Canadians will have their eyes on both themselves and the US, at all times and so the actions taken will be influenced heavily with this neighbor in mind.
Viewed from the information perspective, Canadians will naturally have more information available. They focus on more than themselves, and they can see that the games are distinctly different. I am not sure if they look at Europe with better eyes than people in the US do. I would imagine a strong focus on England is in place.
Female representatives sit in more than one-in-four Canadian seats. That is below the one-in-three that I call the bare minimum, but it’s better than the US one-in-five, and a very good result for a system of winner-take-all.
From communications with other Canadians, I am aware that there is a better view on yellow (per my storyline) than Statelings have. But there is still something not-fully 3D. It is harder to pin down, because of the more comfortable situation of Canada. I would say that if there wasn’t such a strong neighbor next door, Canada would be fully 3D by now, because it has so many 3D features already.
Thanks, Benjamin. Glad you replied further.
