Against Presidencies

June 22, 2021

This blog post was written by Jacob Frazier. Jacob is the blog editor with the Alhambra US Chamber.

The three-branch system of the United States government has long been held up as a worthy system to emulate, and many democracies have implemented Presidential systems imitating it. However, having a separately elected executive is counterproductive, tending not only toward potential coups and a stifling two-party system, but also less efficient government because of bureaucratic bloat and gridlock. When considering new models of government and making amendments to existing ones, we should create parliamentary systems in order to have more stable, efficient, and democratic government.

Presidencies are not the only system of government that tends toward two-party systems; winner-take all elections also contribute. However, in presidential republics, one central political prize holds huge power over the country, so in order to be viable, every political party must have some chance of winning the presidency. This tends toward a country divided about evenly between two parties. Everyone loves to talk about adding third or fourth parties to the US system, but nobody talks about how getting rid of the presidency (and adding proportional representation) would make those parties more viable. Some of the Founding Fathers also believed that a multi-party system was preferable to a two-party one, but they failed to anticipate how the system they devised tended towards a two-party system. Because Presidencies do this they stifle outside voices, which makes the government less democratic than more diverse parliamentary systems.

Opponents of parliamentary systems argue that parliaments are less decisive than presidencies, since in a presidential system one person is given the power to take quick action. However, when the President is simply removed from the government, the legislature is given free reign, through the Prime Minister-appointed cabinet. In a presidential democracy, the executive and legislative branches are constantly at odds, which impedes the process of government rather than making it more efficient. In a parliament, the branch closest to the people has the real power to govern, and disputes occur unimpeded, rather than between two branches that constantly have to fight each other to get anything done. For this reason, parliaments are more proactive and able to solve problems at all levels of society.

Some observers even say that because of the gridlock created by presidencies, they create a stronger incentive to launch a coup. Because both the President and Congress are elected by the people, they can both claim to speak for the people and have a mandate to make unilateral decisions on their behalf. When there is no clear mechanism to resolve these tensions, they can break down into violence. The separation of powers may have been meant to make governments more stable, but instead it bottles up tension, increasing the possibility of government collapse.

Additionally, getting rid of presidencies reduces the incentive towards administrative bloat. An executive branch, because it cannot pass laws directly, builds power through political appointments and a tangled bureaucracy that works like a pseudo-legislature with far less accountability than the true one. We have seen United States Presidents steadily accumulate power over the centuries, from Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt to the whole string of modern leaders. The founders may have given the longest list of powers to Congress in the constitution but the centrality of the President and their bureaucracy has proven overwhelming. If the United States and other nations eliminated the presidency it would make their governments leaner and more effective, while bringing them closer to the voters.

The last major advantage claimed by advocates of presidential systems is their supposed stability. Because parliaments can call votes of no confidence whenever they please and have more political parties, they ought to have less longevity than Presidential systems. However, although bad leaders are less tenacious in a parliamentary system, effective Prime Ministers and Chancellors can consistently earn the support of the voters and their fellow MPs. Presidencies, on the other hand, clumsily provide a fixed term for a leader who may prove inept early on and who cannot be removed either by the people or the legislature. In the United States, this problem became so pressing that Presidential term limits were immediately implemented after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, by Republicans who wanted to limit the President’s power relative to Congress. In fact, thanks to these term limits, some parliamentary leadership stays in power longer than US presidential leadership can, creating a more stable government in the long run. There are times when parliaments select bad leaders, and some analysis suggests that they increase the power of incumbent parties in authoritarian systems. But the argument that they are inherently unstable does not hold water. Presidencies have the worst of both worlds: they struggle to remove bad leadership by impeachment and cannot use votes of no confidence, so they have to slap on the band-aid of term limits, which neuters their own system and prevents effective leaders from staying. Parliaments can more easily jettison ineffective individual leaders, which enables them to keep effective ones in charge for longer.

Parliaments tend to settle into multi-party systems, which create greater accountability to the voters than two-party ones, and have less incentive to create bureaucracies and gridlock. The Founding Fathers of the United States thus had it backwards: Presidencies make governments less decisive while still enabling bad leaders to seize power, and lead to the two-party or two-faction system that the founders feared so passionately. Countries that transition to democracy should not include a separately elected executive in their constitutions, and democracies that have presidencies should remove them in favor of parliaments. And if Americans decide to hold another Constitutional Convention or consider amendments to erase their presidency, they should take decisive action to return power to the people’s house.

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