national differences on various issues

[VJ]

Ok, So I've lived in three different countries long enough to teach me that there are some things we take for granted, that are actually quite different. I'll list a few, before I get to my question.

1. guest presents when hosting a dinner party
In Belgium, when the guest bring a present (e.g. a bottle of wine), the host thanks the guest and puts the bottle away.
In Poland, when the guest brings a present, the host offers to open the bottle of wine (unless it really would not fit, in which case he apologizes for not opening it).
(exception in Belgium are chocolates, which the host tends to present with the coffee)

2. wedding party
In Belgium, the married couple with their parents are first at the party venue and receive/welcome the guests as they arrive.
In Poland, the guests arrive first at the venue and welcome the married couple.

3. ambulances
In Belgium, an ambulance is dispatched from a hospital, and has to take you to that hospital (this implies that that hospital has the capacity and ability to help/admit you). They have to take you there EVEN if there is a closer hospital.
In Poland, an ambulance is not connected to a hospital, and when it has a patient, it has to look for a hospital that can take him. In pandemic times, this resulted in queues of ambulances at some hospitals due to ambulances simultaneously going to the same hospital.

4. administrative documents
In Belgium, you hand in paper documents in city hall or wherever that document has to go; you have no proof that you gave it.
In Poland, you hand in the document and a copy; the copy is date-stamped and returned to you as proof that you gave that document.

5. labour unions
In Belgium, unions are very well connected (cross-sector) in a hierarchy, so when the union in a sector (or even company) wants to go on strike, it is very possible that the strike goes to the whole sector or even cross-sector and paralyses the country (as in: no public transport, no mail, no factories, ..., combined with barricades on major roads). They also pay for the members' salaries, which makes a strike not a financial loss for the worker. Strikes are usually organized on a Friday: many people stay home (long weekend, no financial loss) while the union presents what a success it was using the data of how many people stayed at home as reflecting how many were on strike. The unions are financed by the government and the members, and as such are rich: they have the reserves to paralyse the country for months, which makes them very (too?) powerful in persuading the government: paralyse the country for a few days and the government will cave.
In Poland, unions are very isolated in their sector and company, a strike in one sector rarely affects other sectors (quite often it just results of a strike in one company rather than the sector). Days on which people strike are days with limited or even no salary. Unions are not rich, so their power is much more limited.

6. voting
In Belgium:
Voting offices are determined by population density (denser areas get more offices).
Eligible voters receive a voting card on which it says in which voting office you have to go (this is the closest one to your official address, 3 months before the election - it is always at walking distance from that address). You have to take your id (which every 18+ person mandatory has to have) and go to the office. If you did not receive your voting card, you have to report this to city hall but still have to go voting (voting in Belgium is mandatory). You cannot change your voting office (you get free public transport to get to your voting office), and there is no early voting or mail voting, everyone votes on election day.
In Poland:
Very similar in concept, only difference is that is not mandatory. There are options to change the voting office (has to be done beforehand) which do not exist in Belgium; and there is some form of early voting in embassies (for people who are abroad).

Basically, I started this thread due to the voting in the US: it seems like such a chaos. There is early voting, drop-in ballots, mail voting, situations where there is one voting office for over a million people, a lot of talk about voter intimidation, ... It just seems so chaotically done and the chaos seems to get bigger with every next election (weird to us is for example that some people do not have an ID card and that driver licenses are used as ID).

But I just thought it would be interesting to list such differences: we are quite an international group, and some concepts we think we know may not carry the same interpretation. These are things you only discover when you live long enough at a place.

[UtwigMU]

In Slovenia we have regional differences despite falling between New Jersey and Connecticut in area. In Ljubljana (historic land of Creina) the colloquial word for electrician is stromar (from German Ströhm, stream), while in West (land of Littoral) the word is electricist (from Italian). There is a difference as stromar arrives about two weeks sooner than electricist.

The people here in west have more manana and work smart not hard attitude. They are more fashionable, more easy going, food is better (cheap places have tasty food, while in central food tastes bad in cheap places). They are also less prone to road rage, people cross in front of cars expecting them to stop, while if you do that in Ljubljana you get run over.

[Dr Mordrid]

This is the 2016 US electoral map divided into won congressional districts.

[VJ]

There was a beautiful map of Poland after the elections. Divided by województwo ( more or less provinces) the map overwhelmingly had one colour. Divided by powiat (counties), the map overwhelmingly had a different colour (top left vs top right).

https://m.demotywatory.pl/5011523

PO is one party, PiS the other. The caption reads: this is what PO sees vs this is what PiS sees.

Both maps are correctly reflecting the result. A lot depends on the granularity of the data, as some aspects in such spatial representations are not visible (e.g. how many people in a region). The bottom representation tries to correct for this, by scaling each area (I don't know if with number of residents or number of voters, as that could also give a difference). I work in processing spatial data, I know the issues of such representations and esp. with close data as this one.

But why bring this up here... I wanted this to be apolitical, just about procedures...

[Dr Mordrid]

US procedures vary by state, each having a broad degree of home rule. This includes the drawing of Congressional districts, how voting is done and counting procedures. This mirrors most of our criminal and civil laws, 95+% of which are local & state legislation. To a degree, we are like 50 small countries with the federal govt. presenting a more united face for foreign policy, inter-state commerce, national taxation, etc.

[VJ]

What many people do not realize is that Belgium is also a federation, consisting of 3 "states": Flemish, Walloon (which include a German-speaking part with some independence) and Brussels area. They each have their own parliament, but there also is a parliament at federal level. While they are less independent than the states in the US (I think), there is quite some independency on many matters.

O, this brings me to government formation!

In Poland: elections pass, biggest party supplies prime minister and the minister positions. And then they just start.

In Belgium: elections pass, which triggers the start of the formation phase. This means that the parties will negotiate to try and form a coalition which has majority. In these negotiations, they discuss the general direction of the next legislature and already discuss which points will be put on the agenda and to some extent how they are dealt with. The coalition supplies the prime minister and minister positions, so ministers can be from different parties (we have over 10 political parties in the federal government, distributed over Flemish and Walloon regions). During coalition forming, the outgoing government stays in power but with severe restrictions on what they can decide and on budget.
After last elections (May 2019), they formed a temporary government to handle the corona situation, while continuing government formation; since this month there is a new government. This time, the biggest party is not part of the coalition (which some deem undemocratic), but this is not the first time for that to happen. After the elections before that, coalition forming lasted nearly two years.
In Belgium, the government falls if the coalition breaks (e.g. not all parties in the coalition agree anymore), as then majority is lost. The prime minister then has little options but to resign, triggering new elections. In Poland, there is virtually no way in which the government can fall (edit: government can fall if a majority in parliament files a motion of distrust, which is then approved by the senate).