Arend Lijphart is a political scientist who has spent much of his career trying to answer the fundamental question, “What works best?” and he thinks he knows the answer. “Democracies work best if they are consensus instead of majoritarian democracies. The most important constitutional provisions that help in this direction is to have a parliamentary system and elections by [proportional representation]. The U.S. is the opposite system, with a presidential system and plurality single-member-district elections,” he said an email, drawing on complex quantitative analysis he’s done to compare economic and political outcomes across dozens of democratic countries with different systems.
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