The percentage of people who can vote isn't a linear measure of "democracy." It's the classic case of "getting from 0 to 1 is the hard part." Extending the franchise to a large fraction of the population and having stable transition of power and fair elections is the hard part.
And women have been able to vote in the U.S. for decades longer than the governments of the E.U.'s largest countries (France, Germany, Spain, and Italy) have existed in their current democratic forms. When women got the right to vote in Wyoming, kicking off the movement towards national women's suffrage, the French were on Napoleon III, Spain had a king, Germany wasn't even a country yet, and Italy was a recently unified Kingdom.
alt Hacker News
The percentage of people who can vote isn't a linear measure of "democracy." It's the classic case of "getting from 0 to 1 is the hard part." Extending the franchise to a large fraction of the population and having stable transition of power and fair elections is the hard part.
And women have been able to vote in the U.S. for decades longer than the governments of the E.U.'s largest countries (France, Germany, Spain, and Italy) have existed in their current democratic forms. When women got the right to vote in Wyoming, kicking off the movement towards national women's suffrage, the French were on Napoleon III, Spain had a king, Germany wasn't even a country yet, and Italy was a recently unified Kingdom.