> Please evaluate claims on their merits. Are the judiciary, executive and legislative branches not dependent on the aggregate of the DNC and RNC, directly or i

> Please evaluate claims on their merits. Are the judiciary, executive and legislative branches not dependent on the aggregate of the DNC and RNC, directly or indirectly? The structure of the US government naturally creates a two-party system; but the reason why those two parties are the Democrats and Republicans (and not the Whigs and Libertarians or whatever) is that those two parties outcompeted all the others for votes. Minor parties are constantly trying to break through. They usually fail, though not always--we don't have Whigs anymore. But even when they fail, the major parties are constantly watching for this threat, and adjusting their positions in an effort to keep their dominance. The dominance of the DNC and RNC doesn't mean the people who control those two parties can do whatever they want; it just means those people want to keep their jobs, know the only way to do so is to behave in a way that wins elections, and are pretty good at figuring out what those behaviors are. That's probably not the best imaginable way to translate the will of the people into a government, but the path is clearly there. No remotely comparable path exists in the PRC. Finally, I believe you've misunderstood the paper you linked. Quoting: > As noted, our evidence does not indicate that in U.S. policy making the average citizen always loses out. Since the preferences of ordinary citizens tend to be positively correlated with the preferences of economic elites, ordinary citizens often win the policies they want, even if they are more or less coincidental beneficiaries rather than causes of the victory. In other words, let's say the elites want A, B, C, and D, and the average citizens want A, B, C, and not D. We actually get A, B, C, and D. Then the will of the elites has perfect explanatory power (which they've described using the word "cause", though obviously nothing here shows causality), and the will of the average citizens contributes no further information; but the average citizens are still getting most of what they want. It can't be otherwise, or else the average citizens would vote a third party in. That doesn't need to actually happen to affect policy--if the current major parties are run by skilled politicians who want to keep their dominance, then the threat is enough. At the margin, I do agree the two-party system gives the two incumbents considerable independent power--there's a coordination problem in choosing what third party to vote for, so an incumbent has to diverge significantly from the will of the people to lose. This is in no way comparable to the absolute power that the CCP enjoys over China, though.