[tornadofart]

I believe your view of what democracy is tainted by what USA democracy looks like.

Quite a few countries have more or less successful parlamentary democracies, where winner-takes-all situations are avoided by design. In these, a party rarely has the upper hand and coalitions are the only means of reaching power. The agreements these coalitions forge to govern are a proxy of the compromises all societies have to agree on to function.

[marcusverus]

Which countries do you have in mind? In my experience, most parliamentary democracies have rules which actually exacerbate the issue. See for example the elections last year in Germany, where the CDU/CSU + SPD coalition won a majority in the Bundestag with less than 45% of the popular vote!

[tornadofart]

I thought "Dominate or be dominated" was the problem you saw in democracy?

Well, then I guess Germany's example is not too bad.

"CDU/CSU + SPD coalition won a majority" ... well, no. That's not how it works at all.

CDU and SPD did not win a majority together, since they were opponents in the election, and fought tooth and nail over, for example, immigration issues. They did not, at all, campaign together.

They both failed to win over half of the parliament seats. In simplified terms, they both lost. Everyone lost, if you will, because the system is not designed for anyone to easily win over half of the parliament seats.

That's why they had compromise and form a coalition. Thus no-one rules completely over the other and, in theory, the compromises of coalitions have a better societal outcome than the extreme views one party or the other might hold on a certain issue.

I'm not sure why the popular vote is an issue here. Every democracy has a system for aggregating votes to parliament seats and the transmission is never 1:1.

In this case: Votes for parties that don’t enter the Bundestag (e.g., those below the 5 % threshold) are not counted in seat allocation, making the share of seats for CDU + SPD higher than their raw vote share. Seats are redistributed proportionally among the parties that did enter parliament.

I don't see much of a problem. The claim that a fragmented territory with a multitude of small democracies is a good thing is a libertarian pipe dream. This view is quite frankly absurd considering that every government task is subject to economies of scale: defense, police, health insurance, social security, pension systems, roads, you name it. This is a scenario for winner-takes-all situations between nations, which is a much much worse outcome than even a winner-takes-all situation between political parties.