alternatehistory.com

So for the past few weeks, my friends and I have been having a series of discussions on the nature of the US government and in particular our election process and also our views on social services provided by the government, brought on of course by the circus that the 2016 presidential election has turned into.

I've been kicking around ideas with them, and so I thought I'd bring this up here and see what comes up.

Are their any realistic points, either during the 1787 convention or after, that the US could have seen some major alternative developments in how it is governed, specifically some of the following possibilities:
- Westminster-style parliamentary democracy nationally
- Proportional party representation instead of First Past the Post (FPTP) elections
- Some individual states breaking with the national trend to have either westminster-style democracy in their states, and/or proportional elections locally
- regional administrative zones (the concept here came about from a conversation where we discussed how the US is really too big to effectively pull off some of the social programs so common in Europe, and the idea came up that we set up multi-state admin regions to manage social services like health, education, police, etc.)

Open to other possibilities as well. Just curious what other ideas people might have.
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