That brush, Benjamin, is used too quickly. You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, probably because you are not familiar (enough) with the many other versions of democracy.
Female representation is much better in nations with proportional voting. When New Zealand changed its two-party system in 1996 to incorporate proportionality into its voting system, the number of female representatives jumped by almost 50%. When San Francisco changed its at-large voting system to district voting in 2000, the 5 females and 6 males on the Board ended up becoming 1 female and 10 males overnight.
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An interesting distinction occurs for the poor in nations with proportional voting. If they have an empowered president, then the poor tend to be poorer. If they do not have an empowered president, then poor are richer (while still being the poor in their societies of course, but with a bit more to spend).
Winner-take-all influences the outcomes in a negative manner (and an empowered president is always a winner-taking-all) because the system involves losers, while proportional voting has no losers.
The poor in the United States share less of this society's wealth than the poor in any nation in the world with the pure proportional voting system or with a mixture (without an empowered president).
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This is very easy explained by the voting systems.
In proportional voting there are no losers because all voters are represented around the table. When the poor come out to vote, they get their own representatives. When they are sitting around the table, they can speak up; they are not muted. They may be in the majority for some decisions, but everyone heard them at the highest level in the nation.
In the USA, we do not have that. The Blue Party and the Red Party love the votes of these poor of course, but the poor are not served very well by our voting system. They are a rather marginalized political group.
Let's dig in:
The US Senate, as the example, is picked by about 60% of the voters. So, 40% got nothing at all. They are muted, censored, not represented.
While we can say that a Republican not getting represented by a California Senator is still represented by Republicans from other States, we can also say that 40% of the voters across the entire nation were not allowed their input. The input by voters - period - got diminished because of the voting system.
For either party to rule the Senate, they need to secure 30% of the votes. These are specific votes; they are not 30% of the votes across the board. Yet in Sweden, the Netherlands and Spain, the majority needs to grab 50% of the votes across the board. So, that is 20% more attention given by politicians to the voters, for sure, and not given to special interest groups and their money like we have here.
Red and Blue cannot deliver a full-colored outcome, and most people understand that readily. However, those that grew up in this kind of a society can be blinded by never having seen the third primary color in their political system. I am not aware of anything Yellow Party in the USA, not even close of it being interesting other than sporadically spoiling the outcome for Red or for Blue.
What one is not aware off, one cannot miss. Your brain has never learned to incorporate a Yellow Party and your reply shows that because you are not even focusing on it.
This is my forte, and I would say this may not be yours.
Let me finish with a big compliment nevertheless because I recognize readily that you have a fantastic brain and you can see the big pictures played out in society/societies real well. You never need to doubt my admiration. This specific aspect, however, may be your blind spot.
Thank you for the good communications, Benjamin, plus your really good articles.
