I have questions about this question: When do you consider each country to have "adopted democracy"? What do you mean by "less sophisticated"? Articulating these may facilitate an answer.

The United States adopted democracy before all of those, and is more technologically sophisticated than any one of them.

But this all begs a question: what do you consider sophisticated, and how does that qualify compare between regions?

Certainly we can agree that American technical sophistication is an outgrowth of many industries, from agriculture to entertainment, to energy and material sciences. Germany's developments in technology were for many years driven by the industrial region of the Ruhr, which only became a dynamic economic force late in the 19th century.

Today advances in other fields in Germany are driven as much by geopolitics as internal economics. Energy exploitation is a close cousin of heavy industry. Transportation is a further offshoot.

The U.K, far from the least advanced of these, produced a disproportionate number of the best computer scientists and theoretical mathematicians, from Newton to Hawkins, to Turing, to Dyson. And we shouldn't forget English contributions to maritime technology, public administration, book keeping, and banking.

If the question is: how come Germany has the coolest cars? Well, it's because of the market pressures that keep people buying and making new German cars, and because they learned how to make cars and other vehicles originally to be used in combat, so they tend to work.

But if you're not looking at each region as being the result of a definite history, a culture, a set of resources, and set of current goals, then "why are they different," is like asking why a German and a Frenchman aren't the same in every way.