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This is subjective, but as an American living in NL I've been fairly impressed with the Dutch government's (parliament, cities, unions, within parties, and cour
by furyg3 13y ago
This is subjective, but as an American living in NL I've been fairly impressed with the Dutch government's (parliament, cities, unions, within parties, and courts) pragmatism.
While there are cases of people maintaining hard-line statements, it seems to be less common than in normal US discourse.
- troels 13y agoProbably, the common law vs. Civil law has a lot to do with that.
- furyg3 13y agoI'm not sure. Civil codified law would make the judiciary less able to say "well, we tried X, it doesn't work, let's do something else". Anyway, I'm referring to something more broad than that. While Dutch politics is still, well... politics, it seems like there is much more of a pragmatic approach. People expect the government to be effective. "Is policy X working or not?" is a common theme on the news, there are lots of statistics and reports, and politicians aren't trying to always spin their way out of them (though it certainly still happens, just less). The whole society is a lot less concerned with black and white framings like grand economic theories, philosophical stances on law and order, or enforcing morality. They're more concerned with things working.
- Someone 13y agoNot having any party with anything close to a majority in parliament helps enormously here (that might be a symptom, rather than a cause, though) There are very few things that you will find a straight majority for in parliament, so hard-lining will get you nowhere.