ABSTRACT
Generally, whenever the U.S. is compared with other countries, the emphasis is on contrasts rather than similarities. Nevertheless, I would argue that even among political scientists there is insufficient recognition of how radically different American democracy is: it is different not just in many respects, but in most respects! And politicians, journalists, and the attentive public are almost completely unaware of these differences, with the exception of a few policy questions. For instance, the fact that the U.S. is the only industrialized democracy without national health insurance and with highly permissive gun laws is occasionally mentioned in the media. But other salient differences, like our big income inequalities, relatively low tax burden, and extremely large prison populations usually escape attention. And there is little recognition of, and interest in, the many contrasts between the operation of democracy in the U.S. and that in other countries. Even as well informed a politician as President Bill Clinton apparently did not know that proportional representation (PR) is widely used in democracies around the world-and that the U.S. is the deviant case-when he commented in 1993 that Lani Guinier’s advocacy of PR was “very difficult to defend” and even “antidemocratic.”
