In the United States, party machines and family dynasties have gotten significantly less powerful in the last century. The former seems to have had some unintended consequences but is probably good on net.

In the UK, the House of Lords has gotten significantly less powerful over the last century.

More countries use parliamentary than presidential systems than was the case 100 years ago, which is good.

I think there are improvements one can point to.

Seventeenth amendment in 1913 is only a bit more than 100 years ago, and that’s a pretty big one.

(Women’s suffrage in various countries at various times is also a fairly big one, as is the Voting Rights Act in the US.)

I mean these sound like saying that “democracy as practiced in Australia a hundred years ago is becoming more common worldwide”?

(or more fairly, given the civil rights movement, perhaps there has been little improvement in the past 50 years).

it’s not quite as quick as Moore’s law, is it.

This is harder to quantify and hasn’t “paid off” yet, but informally I feel like the median voter today is much more likely to be aware of the drawbacks of FPTP and two-party systems than the median voter in 1920. Hell, I regularly see people online citing Arrow’s impossibility theorem (even if I think that finding is very often misused). There’s more awareness of potential for improvement than there used to be.

It may be a while before this translates into action, just because unilateral defection from 2P+FPTP is so costly, but we’re in the “consciousness raising” stage and I want to think something will come out of it eventually.

this really is the perfect demonstration of why politics is so difficult: imagine if one country was using 2020 era computers, aeroplanes, and televisions and another country was using 1920 era logarithm tables, zeppelins, and radios, but people were coming around to the idea of modern technology and give it another hundred years and they might think about switching.