True democracy is really just mob rules. There is no accountability because when things go badly the voters are blamed which of course means no one is responsible. You really can't compare the politics in a country as large as diverse as th US to some place like NZ. You can't even compare us to European countries, we are closer to the EU. On a local level poltics are much less divisive. One of the reasons politics has gotten so ugly in the US is that progressives have gotten more and more belligerent when it comes to pushing their politics into areas where it has no support.