Why the parliamentary system can’t save America
The self-righteousness gripping Canada in the wake of America’s recent credit downgrade has not been limited to a mere defence of our supposedly superior fiscal policies. Those are certainly great, we all agree, but many commentators are now going one step further, arguing that the US’ lengthy legislative impasse over its debt ceiling has highlighted the fundamental bankruptcy of the entire American political system, too, casting a glowing light upon the contrasting supremacy of Canadian parliamentary governance.
Checks and balances? Ha! The American system is so deadlocked “they currently have no ‘balance’ and can’t even cover the ‘cheques’ they write,” wrote a letter-writer in the National Post the other day. John Pepall, a man who has made a career out of defending our parliamentary status-quo, went even further, dismissing the US system as “a multi-sided game of chicken in which everyone is trying to avoid responsibility,” and predictably wind up achieving very little in the way of results.
Though not a Canadian himself, CNN’s omnipresent super-pundit Fareed Zakaria has now jumped on this particular bandwagon, as I believe Americans are often wont to do in times of crisis. The grass is always greener, of course, and considering how widespread liberal displeasure is with President Obama at the moment, it’s understandable that many progressive-minded Americans would be inclined to turn against the American system itself as they seek to justify their once universally-favoured candidate’s dreary decline.
The main thesis of these parliamentary-boosters is that the US system, with its divided executive and legislative branches, and further sub-divided, bicameral legislature, has effectively prevented America from being able to react swiftly to serious dilemmas such as, say, a gigantic budget crisis.
“We have one party in one house of the legislature claiming to speak for the people because theirs was the most recent electoral victory,” writes Zakaria. “And you have the president who claims a broader mandate as the only person elected by all the people. These irresolvable claims invite struggle.”
Struggle is of course the essence of any checks-and-balances system of government, and something the American model goes uniquely far, globally speaking, in elevating to a status of such high prestige. As we all learned in high school, this sort of constitutional division, the splitting of power among three separately-elected institutions (plus an unelected Supreme Court), was originally cooked up to prevent the tyranny of just one. Without putting too fine a point on it, I’d say this is the basic principle people debate when they criticize the US system: the value of tyranny.
Now, “tyranny” in this sense does not have to mean jackbooted thugs at midnight. It merely describes the complete dominance of a political system by a single branch, or, in more cases, a single person. The Canadian legislative system, for instance, is almost entirely subordinate to the tyranny of the prime minister, who single-handedly controls when parliament sits, when parliament is prorogued, which bills are introduced, which bills get passed, who becomes speaker, and who leads all the parliamentary committees, to cite but a few of his strictly legislative powers.
And yes, that sort of tyranny certainly has its uses. Particularly in times of economic woe, there’s often considerable demand for aggressive, decisive leadership of a nation, so it’s unsurprising that a more authoritarian country like Canada is coming off well at the moment. (I don’t even know if Canada has a debt ceiling, for instance. If we do, I’m sure it’s the sort of thing that the prime minister holds the power to simply raise unilaterally by private decree, or ram through the legislature with one of those voice votes where he simply stands up and tells the speaker “my caucus approves this.”)
But the naivete comes when someone like Zakaria assumes that this sort of tyranny arrives hand-in-hand with unimpeachable legitimacy.
The fact that a strong prime minister like Stephen Harper is able to impose his will o’er the land with very few impediments does not automatically presume that his right to do so will not be widely contested by other political actors, or indeed, the public at large. In fact, following Harper’s most recent re-election, in which he won supposedly the most “legitimatizing” mandate for one man rule in Canada — a majority government — the prime minister’s legitimacy to govern has actually become more widely contested, if anything. The reason has nothing to do with parliamentary governance and everything to do with our political parties and electoral system.
Since one becomes prime minister only through capturing seats in the legislature, Harper was able to win his majority government with a mere 39.6% of the popular vote. He won a majority of ridings even though the majority of voters preferred someone else. To be fair, this is a fate most Canadian prime ministers share. Not since John Diefenbaker in 1958 has any PM passed the magical 50% benchmark, a fact which mostly reflects the amount of vote-splitting that occurs in a nation like Canada, where the vast majority of MP elections are contested by at least three near-equally competitive candidates.
In contrast, President Obama won his office with a solid majority of the popular vote, as have most presidents before him. This may seem predictable considering the well-known weakness of American third parties at the national level, but this two-party culture is unto itself the fairly inevitable byproduct of holding a direct election for an office as big and important as that of the US president. By its very nature, a nationwide vote of millions of citizens for a single office more or less demands the creation of broad electoral coalitions and generally centrist, inclusive candidates. It’s simply way too hard to compete otherwise.
Of course, in his piece Zakaria rightly observes that the president’s democratic legitimacy is considerably blurred in the context of the competing mandates of the House and Senate, whose majority leaders (roughly equivalent to French-style prime ministers) are usually installed with a majority of the popular vote at their backs, too. But a different sort of deadlock can also occur in a parliamentary regime, borne by the very absence of these American-style checks-and-balances.
As we saw with Canada’s 2008 coalition crisis, and some of the drama leading up to the 2011 vote, if a prime minister suffers a clear lack of a popular mandate — as measured by his partisan opponents — various schemes to depose him can be openly tolerated, even if they require the use of some extra-parliamentary force, like the monarch or street protestors (or filibusters and strikes, as the NDP has recently shown). This kinda stuff can certainly bring a nation to the brink just as easily as a president-versus-Congress showdown, and it’s not too difficult to imagine some sort of future coalition crisis-style madness that could conceivably result in a credit downgrade for Canada, too.
Far as I can tell, if one truly desires “stability” and “legitimacy” above all else, there are really only two styles of government to embrace, and neither one is presently employed by Canada or the United States:
a) A parliamentary system in which there are only two political parties and one house. The prime minister will therefore always lead a majority government and will always win a majority of the popular vote.
b) Some sort of pseudo-dictatorship in which a single man is elected with a majority of the popular vote, in a two-party race, and proceeds to hold sweeping powers over everything.
I would hope that both models are quite distasteful to the average voter’s democratic sensibilities, which might explain why no one ever champions them. But at a time when there’s so much complaining — on both sides of the border — about a government that’s either running the country too aggressively, or not aggressively enough, pondering the alternatives might help clear the mind.
August 20th, 2011 at 10:24 am
Interestingly, prior to the Act of Union of 1800, the Irish parliament was often tricameral: a third "House of Proctors", composed of lower orders of the clergy, sat either as a third house or jointly with the House of Commons.
August 20th, 2011 at 11:55 am
While deadlock can certainly lead to problems, another thing that concerns me about our (Canadian) system of government is expertise. Currently our ministers are chosen by the Prime Minister, usually for being liked by the PM rather then any particular expertise they would have in running their respective ministry. What do you think of a system where our Cabinet Ministers are elected directly?
In theory this would result in the Ministers being people with relevant experience or expertise in whatever area they will be in charge of. For example, the Minister of Defence would be a high ranking officer in the military , Minister of Foreign Affairs would be a senior diplomat and so on.
August 20th, 2011 at 8:37 pm
Amazing how parliamentarians always miss the point. We want gridlock. It's intentional! Just imagine how much damage the US government could do if it was efficient!
August 20th, 2011 at 11:48 pm
The difficulty is that the American government was established with the idea that people did not and would not need their government for a great deal. The government was a distant force that seldom, if ever, was to impact the lives of its citizens. Our system favors gridlock because it assumes that gridlock will benefit the people. The problem is that nowadays, people have become more and more dependent on a government that has grown too big for its original framework. After FDR, the government WAS a big part of your daily life. We have a system out of check with reality, and it seems to me that one of them ought to be altered.
August 21st, 2011 at 4:15 am
I wonder about this (Looking into America from outside). Surely most of the stuff that government does in relation to the public is carried out by the bureaucracy. In which case, Congress, the President and the Courts still wouldn't impact on most people's daily lives very much, except in so far as they set the scope of the bureaucrats' powers?
August 21st, 2011 at 4:27 am
I see the issues as less one of the system, and more one of the people using (and abusing) the system. The point behind "gridlock" is that both sides would have to sit down and work out a compromise. But, it seems both sides are completely unwilling to do so anymore, so the system comes to a crash…
"Tyranny" isn't a solution, though. I don't even want to imagine a world where the Tea Party now or the hippie moment 40 years ago would have been able to grab complete control over the system. Checks and balances exists to keep the lunatics out of absolute power, and it seems as necessary as ever today.
The only solution, as I see it, is that politicians need to start acting like mature adults and work together.
August 21st, 2011 at 10:16 am
I think what a lot of Americans forget is that the legislative process in United States was never designed to be efficient. But people are becoming less and less patient with everything these days.
August 21st, 2011 at 11:18 am
I don't believe the Canadian system is any better than the American system, if anything there's a few things that should be loaned to each other. Both counties waste huge amounts of money in giving politicians golden parachutes when they're no longer voted into office.
IMO, if things ever change in the US or Canada, I'd rather see Canada's senate voted for and an elected Govenor General act more like the President. The American system I'd like to see the Electoral college thrown out, term limits thrown out, and rather see both countries have elections of everyone at the same time on a fixed election date (Every 4 years unless a confidence vote ends it early.) It would be even more interesting if both countries would have head of state elections in the same year so that neither country is subjected to "election year posturing" as is the case right now in the US.
August 21st, 2011 at 11:32 am
That would also change the nature of the cabinet and departments into something stable and relevant, would it not?
August 21st, 2011 at 11:39 am
If you had a fixed election date "Every 4 years unless a confidence vote ends it early," the election resulting from the confidence vote would be for only part of a 4-year term. Is that what you want? Or should the following election be held on the fixed date between 3 and 4 years after the confidence election?
August 21st, 2011 at 12:55 pm
I think blaming our electoral system sort of misses the point. If Americans spend and print and spend money like Robert Mugabe, it doesn't matter which party is in office, or how they got there, or how much power they have–our money is fundamentally going to become worthless.
August 21st, 2011 at 3:50 pm
This has been the paradox that has significantly crippled the fixed election date movement in Canada. It's why I think you have to get rid of confidence votes in order to make the system work.
August 22nd, 2011 at 4:18 am
Hard for me to comment on this, as I pretty much agree with everything written, but I will say I disagree with portraying Fareed Zakaria as a typical progressive American. The guy was born in India to parents part of the political class there, so I think it's safe to say he has a bit of a bias when talking about American politics (of course, I'm bias since I think he's an idiot).
And I don't think that Americans generally go straight to believing that turning the US into a Parliamentary system is the right way to go, but it seems that quite a few ex-pats from countries that have Parliamentary systems do. Of course, everyone, including Americans. have tendencies to think everyone around the world should do things their way, whatever way that happens to be, and that's partly why us poor Canadians and Indians are stuck with the British model today.
August 23rd, 2011 at 4:28 am
Except the bureaucracy is funded directly by appropriations from Congress which must be signed by the President. These appropriations can often become political weapons in the face of a executive – legislative showdown, as shown by the recent furlough and temporary shutdown of hundreds of construction projects at airports around the United States and nonessential services of the Federal Aviation Administration, all over federally subsidized rural air service.
August 23rd, 2011 at 2:46 pm
Turning America into a parliamentary nation may be a few steps to far. But I think a good deal of our problems could be dealt with by eliminating the Senate. Two houses of congress is just redundant and if smaller states absolutely have to disproportional representation one could simply fiddle with the number in the house.
August 25th, 2011 at 1:11 pm
The non-binding law fixing federal election dates in Canada says the latter. (It's in October, between four and five years after the last election. But the Prime Minister doesn't even have to lose confidence. He can just decide to have an early election on a whim. It's not appreciably different from how it worked before "fixed election dates," other than that the statutory expiration of the parliament now floats a little.)
August 26th, 2011 at 6:16 am
I have been reading your critiques on the parliamentary system. But you haven't convince me. I've observed the presidential system for the longest. It's not just the matter of efficiency and gridlock. Looking at the history of the US especially recent times alone tell me that presidential system I can't support. It always baffles me why people out side the US who support the presidential system always claim that the president is directly elected by the majority. Incorrect. The electoral college is the final deciding factor in election the president. There have been elections where the president did not rely on a majority of the popular vote or even the electoral college vote to enter office.
August 26th, 2011 at 6:19 am
How much great was the gridlock?
August 27th, 2011 at 9:23 pm
Not since John Diefenbaker in 1958 has any PM passed the magical 50% benchmark
Nitpick: Brian Mulroney got 50.03% in 1984.
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September 4th, 2011 at 7:11 am
As I see it, the strongest argument on either side in the presidential vs. parliamentary debate is the observation that most modern democratic nations are parliamentary systems. Really, the US is the only country on Earth that currently has a long-standing presidential system. That suggests that parliamentary systems are generally more stable over long periods of time. It's possible this is due to some sort of statistical artifact, but it's still ultimately the strongest evidence available.
September 5th, 2011 at 8:59 pm
I am glad the author points out the false belief held by Canadians that the parliamentary system is more democratic. The Senate, Prime Minister and Head of State are all non-democratically elected in Canada. The head of state isn't even Canadian-born or residing.
September 9th, 2011 at 12:26 am
Eliminating the Filibuster in the Senate would be progress enough. There would be alot less deadlock in Congress if bills didn't need a super-majority of 60 in order to pass.
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