Civic solutions in US vs "homogenous" nations

[Hello_Again]

@Ravenman

Serious question: but you are associating cultural diversity with political diversity, are you not?

And if we were to plot countries on a scale of best governed to least-well governed, would you expect that those countries would have some general pattern to their homogeneity? Like, if we took North America - the U.S., Canada, and Mexico - What would the relative cultural homogeneity or heterogeneity mean for the ability to govern those three countries?

I don’t think homogeneity has any relationship to “best governed” or “worst governed”. Norway’s pretty homogenous and AFAIK its doing well. Mexico’s pretty homogeneous and it seems like kind of a shithole. I would not think any direct relationship exists. It has a relationship to “how easy is it to convince most to agree” which is completely different. Discrete groups of people can agree on great ideas or terrible ones. Speed of agreement does not = merit of results. A greater variety of competing ideas means more ideas to choose from, which may result over time in better ideas being picked, but it also mean slower widespread adoption of any particular idea.

Serious question: do you think a state which uses a rule of law to come to policies you don’t agree with is badly governed? Is Texas a badly governed state because its citizens have largely agreed on abstinence-only sex education, one of the worst ideas of all time in terms of results? Is there something lacking in Texas’s rule of law that permitted these ideas? I say no. Texas’s observance of the rule of law, their use of representational democracy as opposed to say, dictatorial fiat, is healthy to my knowledge. Texans just think differently for a whole host of reasons and so they come to different conclusions about what the “best” solution to sexual education is.

And Texans can think those thoughts and live in Texas, and I can think different thoughts and live in NYC, and we both agree we each have equal right to voice our thoughts, and an equal right to persuade others to our view, and in the meantime we’ll argue about it, and that what makes us all Americans. And maybe someday, or not, the entire country will reach a consensus.

[Ravenman]

A fair government doesn’t have to come to conclusions I agree with. But I have to ask whether you see Texas as an example of a more homogeneous polity that is an example of why it may be easier to implement certain policies - because Texas is a profoundly poor example. It’s pretty diverse, all things considered, and has a very long record of political disenfranchisement.

Do you think it is hard to implement new policies in Canada?

[Hello_Again]

@Ravenman

A fair government doesn’t have to come to conclusions I agree with. But I have to ask whether you see Texas as an example of a more homogeneous polity

Sigh. No, it was not an example of a homogenous polity. It was an example of how different places can have different ideas about what “best” means and for their own reasons – a heterogeneous polity – all the while having a perfectly healthy rule of law. This is not only the obvious result of strong Federalism, it was entirely the goal.

Do you think it is hard to implement new policies in Canada?

If you’re asking whether its hard to implement nationwide policies in Canada, as far as I know, Canada is an example of “weak federalism” meaning authority over most issues is vested in the Federal government. So I would think it would be considerably easier to pass nationwide legislation on matters of general welfare (what we call “police powers”) than in the US because in Canada, that power is more directly vested in the Federal government. But actually I haven’t got a clue about the structure of Canadian government beyond that, so I couldn’t say.

[Ravenman]

@Hello_Again

Sigh. No, it was not an example of a homogenous polity. It was an example of how different places can have different ideas about what “best” means and for their own reasons – a heterogeneous polity – all the while having a perfectly healthy rule of law. This is not only the obvious result of strong Federalism, it was entirely the goal.

I wasn’t clear from your previous post whether you chose Texas to illustrate only one point or others as well, so I asked. Can we agree that we can ask each other to clarify our remarks without causing annoyed grunts, eye rolling, or exasperated sighs?

If you’re asking whether its hard to implement nationwide policies in Canada, as far as I know, Canada is an example of “weak federalism” meaning authority over most issues is vested in the Federal government. So I would think it would be considerably easier to pass nationwide legislation on matters of general welfare (what we call “police powers”) than in the US because in Canada, that power is more directly vested in the Federal government. But actually I haven’t got a clue about the structure of Canadian government beyond that, so I couldn’t say.

i agree with your conclusion. But that’s generally contrary to the theory that diverse nations have more problems making policy. Canada is significantly more culturally diverse than the U.S., but has a better developed sense of civil society (IMHO). So if it is harder to establish policies in more diverse nations, then in comparing developed countries, it should be harder in general to make new policy in Canada because of its more multicultural character than the United States. Why am I wrong?

[lew_cody]

We probably shouldn’t overstate (or over-assume) the homogeneity of various European countries. The modern state of Italy wasn’t unified until 1861, after all, and Germany not until 1871. Before unification, each of those areas was very much a patchwork of varying dialects, currencies and customs. Norway itself spent time unified with Denmark and then Sweden.

Regarding the puberty video, whether it would be accepted in a given country probably has more to do with the diversity of a country’s religious and political beliefs than ethnic or other forms of diversity per se. Compare the cases of Belgium and Poland. Belgium is well-known for being divided among linguistic lines (60% Dutch, 40% French and a small German-speaking community), while Poland has a much more homogeneous population (more than 96% self-identifying as Polish in the 2002 census).

Yet the two countries’ social views on matters like homosexuality show a striking difference: same-sex marriage is legal in Belgium, while Poland has had difficulty getting even a civil-union bill passed. The 2013 Pew survey on acceptance of homosexuality did not include Belgium specifically, but two of its neighbors, Germany and France, responded to the question “Should society accept homosexuality?” at rates of 87% and 77% “yes”, respectively. Only 42% of Polish citizens responded in the affirmative. Among the reasons for this disparity, surely, is that Belgium is so much more secularized that Poland is.

The social acceptance of homosexuality cannot necessarily be mapped to how accepting a country would be of the sex-ed video mentioned earlier. But I would guess that, in general, societies that tend to approve of previously forbidden acts or relationships would be more open to frank discussions of puberty. The homogeneity of a particular country may influence how readily they accept “top-down” forms of education that are prevalent in much of the world, but I’m not convinced that diversity or lack of the same is a reliable metric for determining openness to sexual frankness.

[The_Joker_and_the_Thief]

@Ravenman

Studying a culture with deep and long-running problems with racism and intolerance and finding that such a culture has problems with diversity isn’t novel research, it’s a tautology.

Perhaps lower intergroup trust is due to racism and intolerance, or perhaps it is a probabilistic assessment that people from a different part of the world have different cultures and will make different decisions, and are therefore less unlikely to act like ‘us’. It really doesn’t matter. Racism exists and will exist for the foreseeable future. It’s a perfectly fine explanation for why the United States isn’t able to implement socioeconomic policies that rely on high levels of trust like European states can.

[AK84]

Cannot say that the US is particularly non homogenous. It has a dominant language, culture and religion, with at best regional variations and some exotic flavours. African Americans and Italian Americans each speak English, follow a variation of Anglo culture and worship the Christian style.

A Heterogeneous place is the Subcontinent, the Middle East, C and W China, the Balkans, Iberia.

[Northern_Piper]

@Amateur_Barbarian

The American Way works for everyone… except when we’re talking about Japanese education, or Scandanavian sense of morality, or Canada’s general ability to do the “American” thing better than we do it… and then it becomes a huffy, fraught cry of “Why can’t WE do it exactly that same way?”

I don’t think most Americans can even begin to conceive of being a citizen of a country that is 90% or more, sometimes close to 100% ONE population in language, ancestry, history, religion and traditions.

@John_Mace

I kinda see where the OP is coming from, but I wouldn’t call China or Canada “homogenous”. Social programs are, I think, easier to implement in smaller, more homogenous countries than in larger herterogenous ones.

@Amateur_Barbarian

I was trying to keep those in a middle tier between JapaNorsky clones and ragged 'Murrican individual individualisticism.

We could become a lot like Canada. We can’t ever be Norway or Finland or even the UK.

I’ve encountered this idea before here on teh SMB: that Canada is more homogenous than the US. It doesn’t make sense to me.

Let’s take a look at place of origin. In Canada, a fifth of all citizens and permanent residents were born outside of Canada. That’s the highest rate of foreign born residents amongst the G8 nations, and beats the US rate, which is somewhere around 13% foreign-born.

Our largest city, Toronto, has a foreign-born rate of just under 50%: Demographics of Toronto.

So if you’re looking at foreign-born as a way to measure homogeneity, Canada ranks as more diverse than the US.

Another homogenity/diversity factor is the one identified by the OP: language. In the United States, a mere 5 million out of a total population of 301.23 million did not speak English as either a first or second language, a 1.3% rate: Bilinguals in the United States. And an inability to speak English is often seen as transitional among the immigrant community, with the expectation they or their kids will learn English.

Not so in Canada. According to the 2011 census, 22,564,665 (68.1%) Canadians only speak English, and 4,165,015 (12.6%) only speak French. Two-thirds of our population can’t speak to just over one-tenth of our population. And that’s not a transitional phase: the right to speak English or French is constitutionally protected, as is the right of the minority to have minority language schools. Both languages are used in the federal Parliament and courts, and both languages can be used in dealing with the federal government.

Canada is founded on the concept of linguistic diversity which has no counter-part in the United States, and which has been one of the major historical tensions in the county.

Given the high rate of immigration, and the linguistic duality, I fail to understand why the OP thinks that Canada is an example of a more homogenous society than is the U.S.

[Northern_Piper]

@Hello_Again

Edit: Canada’s government is more similar to our own however operates on “weak federalism” in which the federal government has more powers than the provinces (powers not delegated to the provinces are reserved for the federal government).

@Hello_Again

If you’re asking whether its hard to implement nationwide policies in Canada, as far as I know, Canada is an example of “weak federalism” meaning authority over most issues is vested in the Federal government. So I would think it would be considerably easier to pass nationwide legislation on matters of general welfare (what we call “police powers”) than in the US because in Canada, that power is more directly vested in the Federal government. But actually I haven’t got a clue about the structure of Canadian government beyond that, so I couldn’t say.

No, this is incorrect. The US federal government is stronger within the US federation than the Canadian federal government is in within the Canadian Confederation, and the federal government doesn’t have the majority of the powers.

The four major differences between the US system and the Canadian system are: (1) the trade and commerce power in Canada is limited to truly inter-provincial or international trade, meaning the federal Parliament’s legislative power is much weaker than is Congress’ powers; (2) we have a 10th Amendment that works, ensuring a core of powers entrusted solely to the provinces; (3) it’s not the case that the default is that powers go to the feds. We have two residual clauses, one for the feds and one for the provinces. Some matters come into federal jurisdiction under the federal residual clause, but some other matters go to exclusive provincial jurisdiction under the provincial residual power; and (4) our Parliament does not have any power to enact legislation to enforce the Charter of Rights which is binding on the provinces, unlike the case with many of the amendments to the US Constitution.

Now, there are some areas where Parliament has more power than the Congress (e.g. criminal law), and some areas where the states have more power than the provinces (e.g. - state militias), but by and large, the federal Congress in the US has more power than the federal Parliament in Canada.

[Northern_Piper]

@Ravenman

Do you think it is hard to implement new policies in Canada?

@Ravenman

So if it is harder to establish policies in more diverse nations, then in comparing developed countries, it should be harder in general to make new policy in Canada because of its more multicultural character than the United States. Why am I wrong?

Personally, I don’t think it has anything to do with diversity in the populations of Canada and the US. It has much more to do with our political institutions. The US has a system of divided authority within Congress, and between Congress and the President. That makes it very difficult to get anything done, even when the President has won with a significant majority. The US system favours gridlock.

On the other hand, with a parliamentary system which favours majority governments, as found in Canada, governments get elected to get their policies implemented. If they don’t enact something, or they do enact something but it doesn’t work as well as planned, they can’t point to some other government actor. The government in Canada is responsible for getting something done.

That structural difference between our federal governments makes it easier for a Canadian government to implement changes than is the case in the US. I would expect the same holds true with parliamentary Europe.

[Kobal2]

@Ravenman

If one argues that heterogeneity is the reason that the U.S. can’t have nice things, then the hidden assumption must be either than other ethnicities are ruining things for everyone or that Americans (presumably white people) are permanently intolerant/racist/whatever. There’s no other ways I can square that circle.

Same here.

[QUOTE=lew_cody]
The modern state of Italy wasn’t unified until 1861, after all,
[/QUOTE]

Or never was, if you ask the Italians themselves

[QUOTE=Northern Piper]
Personally, I don’t think it has anything to do with diversity in the populations of Canada and the US. It has much more to do with our political institutions. The US has a system of divided authority within Congress, and between Congress and the President. That makes it very difficult to get anything done, even when the President has won with a significant majority. The US system favours gridlock.
[/QUOTE]

Every Western country has separated powers, fer chrissakes. And most of us also happen to have dozens of small parties instead of just the two big ones, which in theory should make it even harder to get anything done (because more diversity = less consensus, apparently. I strongly disagree with that point, but I’ll be happy to hang y’all with y’alls own faulty logic :)).

[Ravenman]

@Northern_Piper

That structural difference between our federal governments makes it easier for a Canadian government to implement changes than is the case in the US. I would expect the same holds true with parliamentary Europe.

That’s an explaination that makes sense to me.

What I’m getting at, obviously, is that the OP is exploring the idea that one cannot take an idea from a country that is a 2 on the diversity scale (Norway or whatever) and import it to a country that’s a 5.5 (the U.S.) because “it just won’t work.” But you never hear people saying that the idea can’t be imported to a more culturally diverse country like Canada, which is like an 8 on that scale.

[AK84]

@Kobal2

Every Western country has separated powers, fer chrissakes. And most of us also happen to have dozens of small parties instead of just the two big ones, which in theory should make it even harder to get anything done (because more diversity = less consensus, apparently. I strongly disagree with that point, but I’ll be happy to hang y’all with y’alls own faulty logic :)).

Only if you count only Australia, Canada, United States and Germany as “Western”. Most European Countries are Unitary States. Having local or regional Government does not give you “separated powers”, the test is who has plenary powers, in other words, who has absolute power to legislate/ make laws unless said law are on matters which are reserved or constitutionally prohibited.

[Acsenray]

At least one issue here is mess of bad assumptions, bad evidence, cherry-picking, bias confirmation, and overgeneralization.

Who says we as Americans are more “diverse” in terms of politics and “ideas” or languages or religion than whatever other country is being talked about?

When this justification is brought up, the particular claim of diversity has to be established first and then proven to be a cause of the phenomenon in question.

[Acsenray]

And just speaking about the experience of being a life-long American, the experience of living in America, from cities to country, is not as diverse as we often pretend it is. You can live anywhere in this country and have a pretty good understanding of the basic facts of life. There is some variation in social attitudes, but this kind of diversity is nothing compared to countries in which when you move from one place to another, you are moving into a completely different society. Our people might be pretty diverse, depending on how you’re slicing the pie, but our society is not necessarily all that diverse.

[Northern_Piper]

@Acsenray

… this kind of diversity is nothing compared to countries in which when you move from one place to another, you are moving into a completely different society.

Exactly. A uni lingual francophone in Quebec can’t just pick up and move to Vancouver, because the language barrier would make it very difficult for the francophone to get a job and live in that society. And a unilingual Anglo from Alberta can’t move to Quebec City for the same reason. Americans do not face those kinds of restrictions and are a less diverse society than Canada and most other multilingual countries.

And that’s not even taking into account the differences in social and political attitudes which can be linked to different linguistic groups in the same country.

[Northern_Piper]

@Kobal2

Every Western country has separated powers, fer chrissakes.

No other western country has separation of powers to the extent of the US, where it really doesn’t matter if the President wins in a landslide. Unless the President’s party also wins in the House, and in the Senate, the President will have trouble getting his legislative agenda passed.

That’s not the case with parliamentary systems, particularly those like Britain and Canada which favour majority governments. If the government party wins a landslide in the main chamber, the government will normally be able to get it’s policies enacted.

And most of us also happen to have dozens of small parties instead of just the two big ones, which in theory should make it even harder to get anything done (because more diversity = less consensus, apparently. I strongly disagree with that point, but I’ll be happy to hang y’all with y’alls own faulty logic :)).

I agree with you that the diversity claim is faulty logic.

[Ravenman]

@Acsenray

And just speaking about the experience of being a life-long American, the experience of living in America, from cities to country, is not as diverse as we often pretend it is. You can live anywhere in this country and have a pretty good understanding of the basic facts of life.

If I’m in a park here in DC and I get thirsty, I drink from a water fountain. In Wisconsin, I’d drink from a bubbler! Plus, if I get hungry, depending on where I am, I could order a sub, a hoagie, or a grinder – but it is all the same sandwich!

What a complex, magical and confusing land we live in! Truly a rich tapestry crammed into a melting pot and Cuisinarted with the salty goodness of ethnic granola.

[Diceman]

@John_Mace

I kinda see where the OP is coming from, but I wouldn’t call China or Canada “homogenous”. Social programs are, I think, easier to implement in smaller, more homogenous countries than in larger herterogenous ones.

Others have addressed Canada. As for China, altho they are quite diverse on paper, in practice “Chinese” = Han, and everone else really doesn’t count.

[Kobal2]

@AK84

Only if you count only Australia, Canada, United States and Germany as “Western”. Most European Countries are Unitary States. Having local or regional Government does not give you “separated powers”, the test is who has plenary powers, in other words, who has absolute power to legislate/ make laws unless said law are on matters which are reserved or constitutionally prohibited.

But even in unitary States, the powers are divided between the President/ministerial cabinet ; the legislative branch & senate ; and the judicial. All of which can be from the same party, or from opposite parties, or from coalitions. Which was my point=, as well as what Northern Piper was talking about.

[QUOTE=Northern Piper]
That’s not the case with parliamentary systems, particularly those like Britain and Canada which favour majority governments. If the government party wins a landslide in the main chamber, the government will normally be able to get it’s policies enacted.
[/QUOTE]

Well, I can’t speak for Britain much, but here in France the executive, the legislative and the local governments are elected on asynchronous schedules, specifically to avoid one group or coalition controlling all of them at the same time.

And what typically happens is that, because government’s approval rating starts steadily ticking down immediately after election day :), they’ll often have to deal with a hostile chamber and/or hostile mayors halfway through their mandate.