One aspect I've never thought about before is the selection of representatives for parliament/legislature. In the U.S., they're pre-selected in primary elections per party, but the national elections are single-winner per seat, so the candidates are out pandering to the voters constantly. I don't know percentages, but many other countries use multi-winner to select their national multi-seat bodies, and my understanding is that those would-be candidates aren't out campaigning, or at least not anywhere close to as visible as they are in the U.S. or the U.K. where there are direct single-winner elections for seats. As ideologically-driven as political parties are, maybe the parties still tend to select more rational, scientific-minded representatives when the would-be reps do not have a requirement to pander directly to the population prior to the election.

India (from wikipedia) also appears to have direct election of its parliament. India is fairly well known for its stifling bureaucracy. Is that coincidence, or the start of a pattern?

Maybe it's also in part due to other countries (those which aren't degenerate and corrupt enough that the government can fraudulently influence elections) knowing they're not the world's largest superpower, and knowing they can't afford to screw around as much.

I'd love to see the voting system changed to Range Voting (best overall?) or Condorcet (best ordering-based voting system?). For its discrimination against third parties, plurality voting is simply horrible, and IRV is nearly as bad[1]. I'll note that I don't think a voting system change alone will fix the American political system.

http://rangevoting.org, despite its nominal bias, is the best voting system resource anywhere.

[1] for instance: http://bolson.org/voting/irv/ IRV fails monotonicity, which IMO is a huge deal. http://rangevoting.org/Monotone.html