I tend to read and cite a lot of stuff from the US, simply because there is a much more vibrant political blogging and commentary scene down there. But obviously that means trying to keep some perspective on what’s different about their situation than ours.

This piece is a good structural analysis of one key difference:

The British system is both more majoritarian and much less laden with veto points. This makes certain kinds of tactical extremism a much less viable political strategy. If you make promises to your base, your base expects you to deliver. And the median voter fears you’ll deliver. That lends itself to a different kind of political strategy. It also lends itself to a different kind of governing strategy, specifically to that kind of bipartisanship by alternation.

This is part of why I’m very unconvinced that Harper’s victory is some kind of lasting realignment. Despite the Liberal Party’s impressive record, government in Canada has alternated between the parties on a fairly regular basis. The character of government has shifted much less significantly, and power has always shifted back. This is not an argument for complacency, or a sense of entitlement: I just don’t think it does any good to start hyperventilating or seeing “epochal change” around every corner.

Still, I wasn’t going to post this until it occurred to me that this institutional structure could also be partly responsible for our less-vibrant political blogging scene. Our smaller population may be the dominant factor — after all, even the US only has one each of Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias and Tyler Cowen. But I think it’s also true that the rewards of political blogging are diminished in a system where the government (even a minority government) unilaterally sets the agenda; competing voices carry very little weight; and there are few if any avenues for independent actors (even within the governing party!) to bring forward policy issues and turn them into legislation.

This dynamic makes me more inclined toward an elected Senate. Before I had thought of it as a potentially paralyzing source of competing democratic legitimacy. Now I think of it as fodder for something to read.