The Superiority of the Parliamentary SystemOne of the debates that have been heat the political science community is about the different types of the government system under democratic rules. Many political scientists have been setting differences between the parliamentary system of Government (Parliamentarism) and the presidential system of the government (Presidentialism). Some political scientist (as in the case of Juan Linz) has argued that the former system of government leads to more efficiency of the political activity than the later. In this paper, I identify myself with those scientists and I will try to demonstrate that the parliamentary system of government is more efficacious, when compared to the presidential system of government.In order to simplify the arguments that will be presented, I will contrast two countries, each one representing a different political system of government. The United Kingdom will represents the parliamentary system and the United States, the presidential system.1. What is the parliamentary system of government?One political regime is classified under the label of parliamentarist when is possible to note and conclude that the focus of the political activity and the center of all political process is based in Parliament. This means that the parliament (or the name that it has depending on the country
[1]) is the main source of the political legitimacy.Because the parliament plays an important role in this kind of political system, we think it is necessary to describe what is a Parliament. The etymological origin of the English word "parliament", in accordance to the Encyclopedia Britannica, is in the Old French word Parlement, which, in its turn, derives from the French verb parler, which means to speak, or in the general terms, to speak one with others
[2]. We can understand the Parliament as a political body where the representatives of a determined nation discuss and make laws concerning the social, economical and political realities of that country. In the James Wilson's sense, a parliament "is an assemblage of elected representatives who both passes law and select the nation's chief executive"
[3].In the parliamentary system, because the source of the political legitimacy is based in the Parliament, there is no such thing as a separated election to the executive branch of the government, that is, the chief of executive and his/her cabinet do not receive the legitimacy through a direct election. The people do not interfere in the decision of who will run the country. The executive is constructed within the parliament by a majority party or a coalition of parties with more than 50% of the total seats in that house. The executive may be defined as a kind of the special committee of the parliament. Because the executive is formed by the members of the parliament, parliamentary system is characterized by what the Hawaiian University Professor of Political Science, Fred Riggs, designates as fusion of power, that is a "balancing rule prevails that produces the fusion of executive/legislative authority in some kind of cabinet"
[4].Another characteristic of the parliamentary system of government is the internal division of the executive, that is, the executive, to use Walter Bagehot's expressions, is divided by a position with a ceremonial power, exercised by the Chief of the State (a monarch or an elected president), and a position of the Prime Minister
[5], with an effective power. Although the former only has the formal power, the head of the government, in the person of Prime Minister, is very powerful.According to the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political institutions
[6], we can at least find two kinds of parliamentary system of government, the two-party adversarial Westminster (Great Britain) model and the multi-party consensual form (Western Europe).The Westminster model is characterized by the fact that the "parliament government moulded the development of the party system and the transformation of the constitution", and "favoured strong cabinet government based on a disciplined majority party elected by single member constituency". On the other hand, the Consensual model characterizes by the fact that "the franchise was extended and parties developed before responsible or parliamentary government" and "led to coalition of several parties elected on the principle of proportional representation"
[7].Since we will focus on the Britain system (the Westminster model), it is important to stress out all the characteristics of this kind of political government. According to Arendt Lijphart
[8], the Westminster model has nine singular features:Þ Concentration of executive power: one party and bare-majority cabinetsÞ Fusion of power and cabinet dominanceÞ Asymmetric bicameralismÞ Two party systemÞ One dimensional party systemÞ Plurality system of electionsÞ Unitary and centralized governmentÞ Unwritten constitution and parliamentary sovereigntyÞ Exclusively representative democracy2.The Presidential System of GovernmentThe principal characteristic of the presidential government constitutes the fact of the existence of a real separation of power among the executive, legislative and Judicial branches of the government, exercised by the President, Congress and the Supreme Court, respectively.In the presidential system of the government there is no such thing as division of the executive branch of the government: the president represents at the same time the head of government, with constitutionally acclaimed powers to administer and execute the nation (the effective power) and the head of the state, that is, the person who represents of the whole nation, with ceremonial power, a reminiscent of the formal powers that a monarch has.The people elect both the president and the members of the congress, and therefore, both the Congress and the President can claim a popular legitimacy (although in the American system, as we know, the people vote indirectly to president, through the Electoral College).3. Some reasons of the superiority of the parliamentary systems (United Kingdom) over the presidential systems (United States)As stated before I believe that the parliamentary system works better. Now I describe and analyze some reasons why I believe that a parliamentary system, when compared to presidential system, is more advantageous.The first question is related to legitimacy, sovereignty, and decision-making. In the parliamentary system the Parliament is the only center of the legitimacy and sovereignty, understood as the only government branch that has a popular support through elections. The executive branch is not voted separately by the people, but it is a special committee of the Parliament, since it is formed by the members of party, which won the majority of seats in the last elections, or by a coalition of party with majority. The executive branch, therefore, is politically responsible to the parliament, and it has to show up some time to the parliament, where the members of the executive, individually or collectively, will be asked questions related to the government policies and actions by the deputies.Since the executive is politically responsible to the parliament, its survival depends exclusively to the confidence of the majority of the parliament. When the parliament lacks confidence on the actions and policies of the executive a vote of no-confidence is brought about and the executive falls and either is convoked new elections or a new government is formed to substitute the falling executive. This means than between the executive and the legislative (the majority of parliament) branches will develop a kind of concept of political and institutional cooperation where the later "compromise" to back most of the initiatives of law that the government presents to the parliament. Therefore it is easy to conclude that most of the government policies will have the consent by the parliament, and, in others words, this means, decisiveness and efficacy.In the presidential system, on the other hand, the executive branch is not formed within congress and, therefore, its survival does not depend on the Congress approval. The president is, theoretically, responsible to people (the electoral) and not to the congress, and the latter can not dissolve the president/executive, unless when the former does not respect the constitution or commits crimes (impeachment).What happens in the presidential system of government, when both the president and the congress claim themselves as legitimate speaker of the people’s will?This may lead to a constant conflict of views between what the president and what the congress want. Since the constitutive system of the presidential system determined a separation of power, "when the executive and legislative branches cannot reach consensus on major issues, gridlock arise in the decision-making process which lead to indecisiveness and drift"
[9].Because the constitutive system of the American government is based upon the idea of the separation of power, andSince both the president and legislature derive their power from the vote of the people in a free competition among well-defined alternatives, a conflict is always latent and sometimes likely to erupt dramatically; there is no democratic principle to resolve it.
[10]Besides the constitutive system, others factors contribute to the gridlock in the decision-making process in the presidential system.By contrary to the British system, where there is a rigid party system and the members of the parliament vote in function of the decision of the party (unless they do not want to be reelected in next elections), the presidential system of the United States is characterized by the independence of the congressperson relatively to the party structure. Since the congressperson want to be reelected, he or she, many times, votes in function of the constituency (of his or her district) - what political scientist describe as a representational vote, that is, "based on the reasonable assumption that the members want to get reelected, and therefore they vote to please their constituents"
[11]. Whereas in the British system the consensus in the parliament is much easy to be reached (since the members' view represent the party view, and there are only three parties - Labor, Conservative and Liberal-Democrats), that is, there are basically three points of views, in the Congress, on the other hand, consensus among the members sometimes are not easily reached since we are before 535 points of views (100 in the Senate and 435 in the House of Representatives). Since in the presidential system there is a deep dependency of the congressperson to his/her constituency,From time to time an issue arouses deep passions among the voters, and legislators cannot escape the need either to vote as their constituents want, whatever their personal views, or to anguish at length about which side of a divided constituency to support. Gun control has been one such questions, the use of federal money to pay for abortions has been another, and the effort to impeach President Clinton in 1998 was a third. Some fortunate members of Congress get unambiguous cues from their constituents on these matters, and no hard decision is necessary; others get conflicting views, and they know that whichever way they vote it may cost them dearly in the next election.
[12]Another point of argument of the superiority of the parliamentary system is related to the fact that whereas in that kind of political system the power changes between the parties (Labor or Conservative), in the United States the power shifts between Congress and President, that is, a weak presidency corresponds to a strong Congress and vice-versa. This fact, allied to the fact of both president and congress can claim legitimacy, lead to a situation where an ambitious speaker of the house may claim an overlegitimacy relatively to the president. That was what happened during the Gingrich era:At first glance, Gingrich appears to have occasioned a revolution in the speakership: he seems to look outward to the rest of Washington, even to the rest of the country, rather than inward to his congressional colleagues (…) He claims to borrow at least as much from presidents - FDR, Eisenhower, Reagan - as from previous congressional leaders. Gingrich has certainly transformed the speakership; he wields far more centralized power than any speaker since the "czar rule" days of Thomas B. Reed and Joseph G. Cannon.… in a political system where the power is fragmented among a number of players, a media strategy is indispensable to setting something done and one of the few effective ways of focusing the attention of otherwise distracted political actors. Media coverage can set the agenda, put a spin on particular issues, raise the stakes of opposition to a given program and create the perception of a public mood that is beneficial or detrimental to a cause.
[13]The second aspect is related to the rigidity of the presidential system of the government. According to Juan Linz, the parliamentary system of government is characterized by its flexibility, a characteristic seen by that political scientist as an advantage of the parliamentarism over the presidentialism.The rigidity of the presidential system is directly related to fact of fixed term of the office (by the congress members and president), that is, neither president nor a congressperson can be removed from his office until the end of the mandate (unless they commit some crimes, constitutionally punishable). We can at least find two negative consequences from that fact. The first constitutes the fact that the rigidity may lead to an undemocratic administration, id est, an administration not popularly elected
[14]. The second consequence constitutes the fact thatThe legal mechanism may also lead, in the event of a sudden midterm succession, to the rise of someone whom the ordinary electoral process would never have made the chief of state.
[15]By contrast, the parliamentary system is characterized by flexibility, which means thatMyriad actors - parties, their leaders, even ran-and-file legislators - may at any time between election adopt basic changes, cause realignments, and above all, make or break Prime Minister.
[16]Because of the flexibility of the system, political arrangements is frequent in order to get reaffirmation of the people's confidence, when it seems that the parliament is truly skeptic relative to government actions. In this aspect, according to Professor Oscar Martinez-Penate,The dissolution of one or both chambers of the parliament may be seen as a way of the chief executive to prove the people's adherence to his or her policies, principally when a national interest in game. For example, "in 1982 due to the Falkland War, the Prime Minister Thacher dissolved the House of Commons and called for a new election, which her party won the majority of seats in parliament".
[17]We can see that parliamentary system permits more people/executive contacts than does the presidential system, which the president knows that we will not have face the elections for 4 years.The third point of distinction between presidentialism and parliamentarism is related to the command of the bureaucracy.In the parliamentary system, the bureaucracy only responds to a single member, the executive branch. All members of the bureaucracy is technically responsible to the minister leading the department where they are, and the minister (or the Prime Minister) is the intermediate between them and the parliament, that is, only members of the cabinet can go to the parliament to respond about the (mis)conduct of a determined member of an administrations. The fact that the power is fused permits theThe government sufficient unity of command to permit it to manage and coordinate a bureaucracy that is powerful enough to deal effectively with the increasingly complex problems of modernity. Moreover, because officials are not responsible to a multiplicity of centers of authority, they can administer more efficiently. Parliamentarism, therefore, provides a more coherent framework for managing the hierarchic component of a modern government (or organization) than the older disjointed presidentialist system based on the separation of powers.
[18]In the American system of the government, on the other hand, the command over the bureaucracy is diffused. The bureaucracy is responsible to the president (the chief executive) and to the congress (the legal creator of the bureaucracy). Therefore, we are before a situation that Fred Riggs classifies of disunity of command over bureaucracy. In this sense, according to the Hawaiian Professor of Political Science, Fred Riggs,Not only is it difficult to secure agreements between the President and Congress, but in practice the heavy agenda carried by any congress compels it to delegate vast powers to its subcommittees, and the congeries of department heads that constitute a so-called "cabinet" in presidentialist regimes actually build competing bureaucratic empires.
[19]Because of this disunity in command the American bureaucracy, when compared to the British bureaucracy, is less efficient, since it has two chiefs, and sometimes its chiefs may have different or even contradictory political points of views. This causes gridlock on the bureaucracy action and decision-making, since it have to work to please both the chief executive and the congress. In fact,Bureaucrats cannot deal effectively with the difficult problems of modern management unless they have a good deal of authority to act quickly, wisely and discretely when handling new and complex problems that vary from place to place and time to time so much that routinization of administration is often seriously dysfunctional.
[20]When it seems that the congress and the president agree on the action of the bureaucracy, another political institution may come into scene: the Courts. This constitutes a disadvantage for the presidential system since the action, authority and decision-making of the bureaucracy is jeopardized.The action of the bureaucracy in the American system, as seen, has to face three obstacles: the presidency, the legislature and the Courts. The power of this is considerably overwhelming when compared to the ability of the Congress or the President to decide about the actions of the bureaucracy, and sinceThe potential for gridlock between President and Congress compels presidentialist regimes to empower an umpire in the form of a Judicial authority (a Supreme Court) that is able to impose a "rule of law" on these contending parties. This is typically done by reifying the Constitution as the ultimate source of authority in a presidentialist state. Thereby, the Judicial branch becomes a third element in the disunity of command that haunts bureaucrats and makes their role inherently problematic in presidentialist regimes.
[21]Another disastrous consequence of the disunity of the centers of command over bureaucracy may lead to a situation which bureaucrats play congress against president in order to get more personal advantage. It is related to this topic that James Wilson wrote thatPolitical authority over the bureaucracy is shared between the presidency and Congress - with its many committees and subcommittees - so that every senior appointed official has at least two masters. This divided authority encourages bureaucrats to play one branch of government against the other and to make heavy use of the media. All this is unknown in nations with parliamentary governments, like Great Britain, where the prime minister and cabinet control the bureaucracy.
[22]Bibliography4The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Institutions, edited by Vernon Bogdanar, Blackwell, Oxford, 19874The Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume 9, 15th Edition4Cook, Timothy, Evolution and revolution: leadership media strategies, in American Government, edited by Peter Woll, Longman, New York, 1999, 13th edition4Lijphart, Arendt, Democracies. Pattern of majoritarian and consensus government in twenty-one countries, New Heaven, 19844Linz, Juan, The perils of Presidentialism4Martinez-Penata, Oscar, Parlamentarismo o Presidencialismo,
www.uaca.ac.cr/acta/1997may/oscarm01.htm4Riggs, Fred, Coping with modernity IV,
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~fredr/6-mstzd.htm4Wilson, James, American Government, Houghton Miffin, Boston, 2000, 5th edition
[1] For example, in Spain is known as General Court (Las Cortes Generales), Assembly of the Republic in Portugal (Assembleia da Republica), Federal Parliament in Germany (Bundestag), etc.
[2] Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, Volume 9, page 161.
[3] James Wilson, American Government, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2000, 5th Edition, page 177.
[4] Fred Riggs, Coping with modernity IV, htpp://www2.hawaii.edu/~fredr/6-mstzd.htm
[5] Or a Chancellor in the case of Germany, President of the Government, in Spain, etc.
[6] The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Institutions, Edited by Vernon Bogdanar, Blackwell, Oxford, 1987, page 408.
[7] Ibidem.
[8] Arendt Lijphart, Democracies. Pattern of majoritarian and consensus government in twenty-one countries, New Haven, 1984, pages 6-9.
[9] Fred Riggs, op. Cit.
[10] Juan Linz, The perils of Presidentialism (italics mine).
[11] James Wilson, op. Cit. Page 204.
[12] Ibid. page 205.
[13] Timothy Cook, Evolution and Revolution: leadership media strategies, in American Government, Edited by Peter Woll, Longman, New York, 1999, 13th Edition, page369.
[14] The case of the Ford administration reveals this fact. Ford and his vice-president, Nelson Rockfeller, were not elected, but nominated. Nixon nominated Ford when his vice president resigned and the later became president because of the Nixon's resignation. Then, he nominated his own vice president.
[15] Juan Linz, op. Cit.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Oscar Martinez-Penate, Parlamentarismo o Presidencialismo,
www.uaca.ac.cr/acta/1997may/oscarm01.htm (my translations).
[18] Fred Riggs, op. Cit.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibidem.
[21] Ibidem.
[22] James Wilson, op. Cit. Page 255.
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