America's presidential system is brittle
Polarized politics are straining our flawed constitutional order
The topline thesis of Destabilized is that a set of interrelated system dynamics has brought the world, especially the United States, into a period of upheaval, instability, and uncertainty. The drivers of the turbulence are structural, which makes this era likely to last for many years.
We’ve talked about a number of these systems and dynamics, including the internet media ecosystem, political polarization, and climate change. Today I’m focusing on another, the relative brittleness of the U.S. constitutional system in the context of a struggle for power between two highly polarized political coalitions. It is less fundamental to the big picture than the dynamics I mentioned, but it’s highly relevant to the near-term future of the United States.
One of the things all American kids learn in school is the Framers of the Constitution built “checks and balances” into the design of our government. The idea is that the executive (administrative) function of government should be separate from the rule-making (legislative) function, and both should be imbued with some governing authority. Along with other features, like reserving some powers for the states, checks and balances ensures that no one entity ends up with too much power.
But, as the late distinguished Yale political scientist Juan Linz pointed out, presidential systems where power at the federal level is divided between executive and legislative branches can get stuck in power struggles with no effective, peaceful mechanism for getting unstuck.
Quick comparative politics review: there are basically two kinds of democratic systems of government, presidential and parliamentary.
In a presidential system (e.g., U.S., Brazil, Mexico, Chile), the president and members of the legislature compete in separate elections and hold distinct but interconnected governing powers. This can lead to divided government, as we’ve seen under every U.S. president since Carter.
In a parliamentary system (e.g., UK, Germany, Italy, Israel), there is just one set of elections, for members of the parliament. The coalition that wins the most power (seats) in these elections chooses the prime minister from within its membership. The prime minister then appoints a cabinet, again from within the membership, and all governing power, legislative and executive, is held by the governing coalition.
Linz observed that presidential systems had a higher rate of failure, including coups, than did parliamentary systems. In a paper called The Perils of Presidentialism, he explained why parliamentary systems are more resilient than presidential systems.
Perhaps the best way to summarize the basic differences between presidential and parliamentary systems is to say that while parliamentarism imparts flexibility to the political process, presidentialism makes it rather rigid. …[W]hile the need for authority and predictability would seem to favor presidentialism, there are unexpected developments – ranging from the death of the incumbent to serious errors in judgment committed under the pressure of unruly circumstances – that make presidential rule less predictable and often weaker than that of a prime minister. The latter can always seek to shore up his legitimacy and authority, either through a vote of confidence or the dissolution of parliament and the ensuing new elections. Moreover, a prime minister can be changed without necessarily creating a regime crisis.
When national politics are polarized and and a presidential system results in divided government (different political parties controlling the executive and legislative branches) the two branches tend to fight for supremacy, which can descend into dysfunction. Because both branches have claims on democratic legitimacy and there’s no effective mechanism to resolve the power struggle, systems can collapse under the strain. This sometimes leads to a coup engineered by the military, whether out of lust for power or simply because no other entity can resolve the political gridlock.
This type of breakdown is less likely in parliamentary systems for two reasons:
One party at a time controls legislative and executive authority.
When intensely contested issues cause governing coalitions to fall apart, prime ministers can be removed by parliamentary majorities and/or new elections can be called so the people can grant fresh democratic legitimacy and power to the side they favor.
In parliamentary systems democratic legitimacy is held by one coalition at a time, so there’s less need for inter-party cooperation than in a presidential system with divided government. And, critically, parliamentary systems have the the break-glass-in-case-of-emergence option of calling new elections, which means less likelihood of gridlock and less potential for disorder.
Another weakness of presidential systems is winner-take-all elections, which can lead to conflict when polarization is high. In contrast, while parliamentary elections can
…produce an absolute majority for a single party, they more often give representation to a number of parties. Power-sharing and coalition-forming are fairly common, and incumbents are accordingly attentive to the demands and interests of even the smaller parties. These parties in turn retain expectations of sharing in power and, therefore, of having a stake in the system as a whole. By contrast, the conviction that he possesses independent authority and a popular mandate is likely to imbue a president with a sense of power and mission, even if the plurality that elected him is a slender one. Given such assumptions about his standing and role, he will find the inevitable opposition to his policies far more irksome… than would a prime minister, who knows himself to be but the spokesman for a temporary governing coalition rather than the voice of the nation.
In addition, the rigidity of presidential fixed terms further amplifies the high stakes inherent in winner-take-all elections. During a president’s fixed-length term in office
…[t]here is no hope for shifts in alliances, expansion of the government's base of support through national-unity or emergency grand coalitions, new elections in response to major new events, and so on. Instead, the losers must wait at least four or five years without any access to executive power and patronage. The zero-sum game in presidential regimes raises the stakes of presidential elections and inevitably exacerbates their attendant tension and polarization.
The bottom line is presidential systems are less resilient than parliamentary systems,1 and these flaws are revealed when politics are polarized and emotions running high.
Interestingly, when Linz was writing in the late 1980s and early 1990s,2 one of the seeming weaknesses of his argument was that the oldest democracy in the world, the United States of America, was a presidential democracy. If presidential systems were more fragile, how had the United States managed to last for 200 years?
Linz attributed the durability of American democracy to “the uniquely diffuse character of American political parties.” He meant two things:
America’s relatively non-ideological parties (politics that was more about patronage than principle, as American politics largely was through the 1950s).
Parties that were ideologically heterogeneous.
As we know, in the three decades since Linz wrote The Perils of Presidentialism, these two qualities have dramatically reversed. America’s two major parties are now both highly ideological – politics today is far more about principles than patronage – and sharply polarized ideologically.
The sorting of the American political coalitions has resulted, in other words, in the U.S. developing two political characteristics that make presidential systems vulnerable to breakdown: 1. highly polarized and ideologically distinct parties, and 2. frequently divided government. To be clear, this doesn’t mean the U.S. political system is necessarily heading toward collapse. The United States is different in several important ways from many failed presidential democracies, including being economically prosperous and having a robust civil society.
While our political system is not destined to fail, in terms of assessing the likelihood of such an outcome, this analysis suggests we should probably update our priors, as the statisticians say.
As I said up top, the destabilization thesis is based on several systems and dynamics, including a media ecosystem that rewards division, highly polarized politics, and increasingly disruptive climate change-intensified weather. Now we can add to this list an American political system that is relatively brittle to precisely the conditions we now have, polarized political parties and frequently divided government.
In a June 2021 Atlantic essay, the authors of How Democracies Die, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, make the point that
…[u]nless and until the GOP recommits itself to playing by democratic rules of the game, American democracy will remain at risk. Each national election will feel like a national emergency.
They are correct, every national election for the foreseeable future is going to feel like an emergency for Democrats who see Republicans mobilizing against democracy itself. And it will feel like an emergency to Republicans, too, many of whom perceive a world where radical Democrats are seeking to “snuff out” Christianity and turning the United States into a socialist hellscape.
This sense of mutual threat is dangerous, and our presidential system is not well designed to handle it.
Notes
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/levitsky/files/1.1linz.pdf
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/democracy-could-die-2024/619390/
Despite the flaws of presidential systems, American myth-making and reverence for the Framers of the Constitution, as well as our success since WWII, established the belief in some quarters that our system of government is the best. But when the chips were down and we needed to help stand up new governments in Germany and Japan after WWII, we chose parliamentary systems. This duality – the good record and reputation of the American system and the flawed reality of presidential systems – was captured in a memorable West Wing scene (the 2 minutes from 0:45 to 2:45).
It was in 1994 when the growing alignment of party and ideology started to become more apparent, as a big chunk of Republicans’ 54-seat gain in the House was conservative and formerly Democratic southern congressional districts electing Republican representatives for the first time in generations.