I'm sorry, Yankee, but after years of hearing the same argument (or a similar variant) I'm a bit skeptical about potential harm to the regions. The plan is built on respecting their own institutions and in those regions having a clear voice in Nyman, and I fail to see a single instance in this game in which having more national-elected representatives than regional ones has led to the regions losing power or somehow falling victims to some sort of opression.
If anything, the American brand of Presidentialism we have adopted for so long also has some serious flaws (particularly regarding gridlock and what can be an excessive separation of powers) which are not necessarily appealing to a large part of the powerbase as well. If there's substantial numbers of players who would refuse to play in Atlasia if it became parliamentary I'd like to know it. I'm tempted to believe few (if any) would not play, but then again I could be very wrong.
That is because we have fought like hell for last nine years to avoid such an imbalance with good reason.
The respect for institutions you cite is nominal and hollow over the long term. You cannot predict what will happen down the road, who will get elected. There is a natural desire on the part of some to respond to a given problem with solutions handed down from on high by the centralized state. We may not have experienced an imbalanced legislative branch, but we have exeperienced a unicameral system. We had it for 12 years and the end result was that the regions were strip mined of responsibility and importance. Why would you want to go back to a model that has arguably already failed for the legislative branch? Bundling it with a parliamentary umbrella is not going to change that fundamental flaw.
Here is something else, why is it that just like Healthcare, that the model everyone fawns over is the British Westminster system? There are other parliamentary systems out there, including a rather glaringly obvious one, that comports itself well with a Federal model of diving gov't between regional and central states. The British setup is fundamentally a unitary state, therefore there is no reason to think there won't be a gradual erosion of the regions and the formation of a unitary centralized state down the road. Of course the problem here is that the German model is bicameral, isn't it?
