On paper they are also a constitutional republic. the democracy is limited by fraud and state control of media?
The difference is, in the US, we at least pretend there's a chance for either party to get elected. And sometimes, we wistfully think that a third party candidate can moonshot, but that's not the way our system works. I have at least one friends that are political scientists, and their theses had to do with different forms of voting and the pros/cons of that, and how we could herald different systems into the united states.
