Are there any Democracies more conservatives than the United States?
So much depends on how you define conservative. Like your list would differ if you meant socially conservative or economically conservative. There are so many sorta-democracies with much more intense theocratic influences than the US (e.g., Israel, Gulf states, parts of Latin America).
In terms of economic conservatism, here's one stat you could use as an index for that: what is the ratio of non-military government spending to GDP in each country? Wealthy democracies tend to fall in a range from just below 30% to just above 50%, with economically liberal places flowing more of their GDP through government social spending.
The most recent figures on that are a bit misleading, since COVID has driven so much policy lately. So I'd argue that we'd do well to look at numbers from before COVID started driving policy so hard. Here's what that data looked like for total government spending at such a time:
https://web.archive.org/web/2020031...s.com/country-list/government-spending-to-gdp
So, after adjusting for 2019 military-spending, non-military government spending was highest in France, at 54.14%, the EU as a whole at 43.8%, and the US was at 34.4%.
Ireland was the lowest of the wealthy democracies, at 25.4%.... though that number is misleading for them, since a lot of Irish GDP isn't really Irish.... it's just earnings of international companies that used accounting tricks to recognize as much revenue in the Irish tax shelter as possible, on paper (e.g., an international company that overpays its own Irish affiliate for services, so that it drives down earnings outside of Ireland and drives them up in Ireland where there will be low taxes). Switzerland and South Korea are probably the best true examples of wealthy democracies with less government spending than the US, 31.7% and 27.57%, respectively.
So, my answer at least among fairly wealthy democracies, would be SK and Switzerland. But, the US is very close... certainly far closer to the bottom of the range than the top. However, if you compare the US to dirt-poor democracies, like India, as well, it looks more middle-of-the-road.
This, by the way, is a good argument for boosting the US's non-military government spending. We KNOW, from ample examples, that it's possible to have a wealthy democracy with much higher non-military government spending as a share of GDP than we have -- and to sustain that. There's no reason to think we'd be entering into a "danger zone" if we boosted our non-military government spending by eight points, for example, since that would still leave us a bit below average by EU standards, and still far below some wealthy countries. By comparison, if we dropped it by eight points, we'd be in a range where no other wealthy nation has sustained besides Ireland, which only did it by way of accounting tricks that overstate its GDP.
To put it in athletic terms, picture if you were training for a marathon and you were wondering whether maybe you should cut back on your training miles, for fear of overtraining and getting hurt, or increase your miles. Well, if you found out that you were already closer to the bottom of the range of mileage than the middle, in terms of the runners you were competing with, and that some good marathoners train vastly more miles than you do, then it suggests you could probably improve with more mileage, and that there's not much risk you're already overtraining. If nearly everyone who trained fewer miles than you was a vastly slower marathoner than you, it would strongly suggest decreasing your miles would hurt your times. Similarly, if nearly every country that spends less of its GDP on government social spending than us is a much poorer country than us, it suggests that moving in their direction is likely to hurt our prosperity.
