In the casual conversation area there is a discussion of possible dramatic changes to the Constitution, but I would like to bring up here for serious analysis an old issue that I often wonder about: would the US be better off with a parliamentary system? The American presidential system works, but it does suffer from a concentration of power in the presidency. Worse, the two-party system seems particularly susceptible to distortions from financial and other factors. Finally, with a parliamentary system, the future of the planet would not turn on a few hundred hanging chads in Florida; minor electoral errors would not have gigantic effects on the outcome.

Of course, such a change is so gigantic that it would never happen. Nevertheless, it deserves consideration, if only to demonstrate some of the weaknesses in our system that we've been living with for so long that we treat them as unavoidable.

So I put the question to the assembled worthies:

Would the United States be better off with a parliamentary system of government?

As you say, this is purely speculative. However, I would be happy with such an change. I would very much like the fact that small parties could have some representation in the legislature. I would very much like the ability to have a vote of "no confidence" be possible against the executive.

The current system in the USA isn't bad, particularly compared to those of repressive governments around the world. However, I think the Parliamentary systsm is a little better.

I think the parliamentary system is better- it definately forces parties to be totally responsible for thier behavior while in power- there is definately a case of "you are in power, this is your watch, you do it right, or your out" kind of deal with it. It caught on well after our own system, I would say it is an evolutionary step up from our own system, though ours is better than anything before it!

I've always been a believer in a parliamentary system. As Hayek explained in Road to Serfdom, overconcentration of power in one political group is always very dangerous. There are three possible antidotes to such overconcentration: federalism, functional division (our "checks and balances") and proportional representation. Our system relies too much on functional division, which is reasonably effective but also inefficient. Even the founding fathers knew it was inefficient; as Lazare illlustrates in Frozen Republic they quite intentionally sought to use that inefficiency as a curb against hasty decision-making. Whether the attempt was successful is open to debate, but I'd say mostly not. Instead, I would like to see us rely more on federalism and proportional representation - two things generally considered orthogonal to parliamentary vs. tripartite government structure but which, in the absence of those checks and balances, gain in importance. Such a system, combined with a shift to a unicameral legislature (another deliberately inefficient aspect of our government), would provide just as strong a hedge against overconcentration of power without the inefficiency of our current system.

Would the United States be better off with a parliamentary system of government?

One of the main reasons the United States exists is our belief that parliaments cannot be trusted. In 1774, Jefferson drafted an open letter to the king on behalf of the colonies entitled A Summary View of the Rights of British America in which he detailed the British parliament's abuses of the colonies and sought the king's veto of the offending acts of parliament. It was not until after the king refused to use his power to strike down parliament's legislation that the Declaration of Independence was drafted, this time blaming the Crown for parliament's misdeeds.

The prevalent view from Britain at the time was that the Declaration of Independence was hugely unfair to the crown because no monarch had actually struck down any important parliamentary legislation for 300 years. The salient portions of Jefferson's 1774 letters would agree...



It is America's bad experience with a tyrannical parliament that led to our independence and our adoption of a Constitution allowing an elected President to veto legislation. It is America's bad experience with a monarch that led us to allow a supermajority of Congress to override a veto.

Yes, America's flavor of representative democracy is inefficient-- that's the whole point. Allowing government, whether a parliament or a dictator or the Spanish Inquisition, to efficiently trample the rights of the People is not a good thing. The Constitution was very intentionally designed to establish limited government because everyone who can exercise such power is susceptible to abusing it. That's why I'm a big proponent of both Judicial Review as a check against Congressional tyranny, as well as a corresponding balance (supermajority override) to protect against Judicial tyranny.

The anti-monarchist sentiments expressed in the "Of Monarchy and Hereditary Succession" essay of Thomas Paine's 1776 Common Sense pamphlet certainly contributed to a growing desire for independence, and the masterful way Jefferson pinned parliament's abuses on the king was pure political genius. However, let's not forget that it was a parliament's abuses of America that led directly to the Revolutionary War.

An Executive cannot be trusted not to abuse power. A Legislature cannot be trusted not to abuse power. A Judiciary cannot be trusted not to abuse power. So we very inefficiently empowered all three in a way that often pits them against one another in an effort to make it more difficult for them to abuse the People. We made the three branches share sovereinty with the States, and gave States all government authority except what was specifically granted to the central government in the Constitution, in order to add additional roadblocks to tyranny.

However, I agree that our current election system is biased in favor of a two-party system, and that we'd be better off encouraging a multi-party environment. I just think that it can happen through some simple election reforms rather than through reverting to a purely parliamentary system.

I think the need for a strict two-party system could be eliminated with an automatic runoff in federal elections. With the automatic runoff, you can either vote for one candidate, or rank the candidates you like in the order you like them. Until one candidate wins a majority, the ballots for the least-popular candidate are automatically recast for their next choice, if one is marked. For example, people could vote for Ralph Nader as their first choice and Al Gore or John Kerry as their second choice. It would be safe to vote for a Nader without actually helping to elect a Bush, or to vote for a Perot without helping to elect a Clinton.

To finish paving the way for third parties, I also think the Electoral College could be reasonably replaced by effectively averaging state-by-state election results together, and then averaging that set of numbers with the nationwide popular vote. Such a formula gives equal consideration to statehood and to population, striking a perfect balance between small states and large states. Problems with election irregularities could be resolved by a little rounding off along the way.

For example, giving each state exactly 10 electoral votes, allowing 10 electoral votes for DC and all non-state territories and posessions, balanced by 510 electoral votes distributed according to the nationwide popular vote, would result in 1020 total electoral votes and a requirement of 511 for election (which could only happen under an automatic runoff system). By rounding off, in most situations voting irregularities concerning less than 100,000 ballots would not affect the outcome of the election. In the event of a 510-510 tie, the winner of the nationwide popular vote would take office unless that also were a tie, in which case Congress would break the tie.

It would be nice to bring some of the advantages of a parliamentary system (such as accommodation of more than two parties) into the American system, but not at the expense of the separation of powers that keeps Congress from acting as tyrannically as unfettered parliaments have done in the past.

(Edited to add, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it," (George Santayana)

I'm no expert, [b]JackP/b] (in fact, I'm asking the question because I don't know the answer), but wasn't the main problem with the way the British Parliament treated what were at the time the American Colonies that they did not offer any representation in Westminster? And that lack of representation, coupled with the all-too-present taxation, gave rise to the discontent that led to men like Jefferson thinking about better ways to govern in the first place?

Had they made an early offer of seats at Westminster for MPs elected by constituencies in North America, would the Revolution have happened as and when it did? (I don't doubt that the simple logistical difficulties of electing people to sit in a Parliament 4000 miles away in the 18th century would have caused friction further down the line.)

Although bear in mind that the Parliament of the late 18th century was a very different animal to the Parliament of today. Representation within Britain itself was still very undemocratic (and taxation levels were generally higher in Britain than in the US at the time).

I agree that the parliamentary system is workable, but so is the one we have.

I wouldn't pavor a push to the parliamentary system. I like this system where a party has to win in a district to get representation. But mostly our system is the system we know and we have a good record of using it.

You are both right to a certian extent, but these are just some of the many issues listed in the Declaration of Independence and The Rights of British America. Unless at least half of the complaints had been "redressed," there would probably have been no way to avoid independence.

Representation in parliament was something the colonists desperately wanted, but according to parliament, the colonies already had representation, just not by representatives democratically elected within the colonies. Representation was more of an issue of dignity than a vehicle for change-- the few seats occupied by Americans would have been unlikely to hold significant influence. We had hope that men like Ben Franklin might have eventually held some sway by the force of their personality, but his pleas to Parliament failed dramatically on occasion. Colonists were lower-class citizens, closely associated with transportation to America as a form of punishment. Old parliament was not predisposed to consider colonists as equals.

As for taxation, the colonies were being taxed by the colonial governments as well as by Parliament. I hear it's a cliche over there, but it was the total tax burden that was a problem for the colonists. Often the taxation that was higher in the colonies was to cover the great expense of shipping, and other costs that were inherently higher in the colonies than in Britain, but the cumulative effects of repeated taxation tended to keep the colonists poor even when they were highly productive. The infamous Boston Tea Party rebelled against a tax rate of three pennies per pound. What I wouldn't give for a three-penny-per-pound tax rate right about now!

Modern parliaments are certainly more enlightened than the ones that oppressed the American Colonies. Rereading what I wrote earlier, I see that it may have implied otherwise. My apologies for any ruffled feathers. Parliaments tend to be more efficient than the American Way, while the American Way tends to protect the People from potential tyranny better than most parliamentary systems. I like having both systems in place in different places so we can learn from each other.
We can borrow good ideas about government from each other all the time without changing the fundamental structure.

I wouldn't have any objection to renaming Congress as "Parliament" and changing Denny Hastert's title from Speaker of the House to Prime Minister, so long as these were mere changes in nomenclature with no changes in duties. But "Congress" and "Speaker" work fine for me, too. If I had been raised on the other side of the pond, I'd probably prefer a parliament to the American Way. But being born and raised this side of the Atlantic, I have a partiality to the idiosyncracies of American government. Gives us more to complain and argue about, if nothing else.

The principle advantage of the parliamentary system is the high resolution of its responsiveness to the heterogeneity of the body politic. Our system is very blunt in its responsiveness to political differences. George Bush wins by a few percentage points and we go zigging way off to the right; had John Kerry won by a few percentage points, we would have gone zagging way off to the left. A healthy parliamentary system is less susceptible to such wide swings of policy.

More important to me, the American system distorts political realities by magnifying tiny factors and shrinking major ones. No presidential candidate would bother campaigning in a state that is solidly on one side or the other; all the effort goes to the battleground states. A few thousand hanging chads in Florida decided the fate of the nation in 2000. A badly designed butterfly ballot in one county single-handedly gave the election to Mr. Bush. The results of an election for a state legislator can lead to new gerrymandering which in turn can change the outcome of Congressional races. Politicians have to pander to pressure groups who dominate the primary process. There are just too many tactical political calculations that trump what we expect from a healthy republic.

In its purest expression, a parliamentary system uses a national election rather than local elections, with each citizen casting a vote for a party, and the overall percentage of votes for each party determining the percentage of MPs from that party. This allows splinter groups to break off from the big tent parties and represent their own interests. How many Republicans are happy with the role of the fundamentalist Christians in their party? How many Democrats are happy with the influence wielded by labor unions in their party? Wouldn't everybody get better representation if there were a Christian Party, a Labor Party, a Capitalism Party, a Socialism Party, a Green Party, a Rape-the-Earth Party, and so forth? Voters complain that they must choose between the lesser of two evils. That's not the case in a parliamentary system.

A common argument against the parliamentary system is that it tends to ignore regional interests. If the elections are national, then the Idaho potato growers don't get their very own representatives. I consider this a feature, not a bug. If we have dispense with regionalism, then we don't get so much pork. A new dam or freeway in Montana will be decided based upon national, not regional, interests.

Jack22 has expressed concerns that a parliamentary system lacks the checks and balances of our own system. I don't see a problem here, as the parliamentary system is so responsive to the political situation that the PM can't get away with dirty tricks; he'd be ousted in a minute. But I invite Jack22 to make his concerns more explicit.

The most serious argument against the parliamentary system is its elimination of the role of states in the federal system. States would be reduced to administrative entities rather than political actors in their own right. The 26 smallest states, controlling 52 of the 100 seats in the Senate, represent just 18% of the American populaton. They enjoy huge political power that would vanish in a parliamentary system, so they would never acquiesce to this loss of power. But we are considering what is best for the US, not what is politically feasible.

That doesn't necessarily mean there is no geographically-based representation. I happen to host a copy of the Voting Systems FAQ on my site, but I can't link there from here so I'll have to explain. Two of the most common proportional-representation systems are known generically as Multiple Member System and Additional Member System. Both require that individuals cast two votes - one for a local candidate, and one for a party. MMS is basically where some of the seats are purely geographic and some are purely party-based. Imagine, for example, that we elected the House of Representatives just as we do now, but the we elected the Senate based only on party instead of geography, and then threw them all together into one chamber. That would be a (poor) form of MMS. AMS is a slight enhancement of that. The local candidates are selected based on simple majority rule, then the "additional" seats are allocated so that each party's total representation (not just among the additional seats) approximates percentage of the party vote as closely as possible. Most often this is implemented using a party list; candidates who win in their district get in that way and are crossed off the list, which is then used to fill any remaining seats for that party from among those who lost their districts, or ran "at large" (e.g. those who are from the same district as another candidate from the same party and thus did not stand for that district in the general election).

Under either MMS or AMS, geographic interests are still represented, but only alongside other interests instead of displacing them entirely. Thus, there might be a member representing Iowa's interests (regardless of ideology) alongside one representing libertarian interests (regardless of location). The relative weight given to geographic vs. other interests can be adjusted simply by changing the percentage of seats assigned by district vs. those assigned from party lists.

Yes, it does. As I pointed out in my previous posts, though, it can have different (and IMO superior) checks and balances.

That's not necessarily true. "Parliamentary system" is often used to refer to both a relationship between roles (legislative, executive, judiciary) and a centralized structure within the executive, but they're actually separable. There's no inherent incompatibility between the "legislative supremacy" aspect of a parliamentary system and federal administration.

Really? In one thread, you decry Congress being dominated by Republicans with a Judiciary that never violates its theoretical role as resolving contradictions-- and in the next, suddenly it's the President (who theoretically only has veto power over law) who determines law. If Kerry had been elected, foreign policy might be different, but his domestic agenda would not go anywhere in Congress. Remember the Clinton presidency? He used his veto power to play word games with Congress, but after he vetoed a Republican law he would propose the same thing using different words and it would pass, which really chafed a lot of real liberals.



I agree that a multiparty system would be better that our two-party system, but as I suggested in my first post in this thread, a parliamentary system is not the only way to get there.



This is just another example of how America was established as a reaction against the parliamentary systems of Europe. As Julian, Ptarmigan and I have discussed in this thread, regional representation was very important to the colonists who felt they had no voice in parliament. Regional pork is a bug in the system that can probably be fixed, but eliminating regional representation would defy America's reason to exist at such a fundamental level that we might as well just disband our country and hand government back over to Britain.



My first post to this thread is about as explicit as it can be on this issue. I'll quote a bit of it here, but perhaps you can reread it identify precisely what needs to be made more explicit





As others have suggested, a parliamentary system wouldn't necessarily have to reduce the power of the states. So I will dispute the idea that reducing the power of the states would be better for the US. The very name of our country, United States of America, indicates that our primary organizational structure is the state. The national government exists to serve the states. What's good for the states is good for the United States. Localization of power, when feasible, is preferable to centralization of power. The idea that centralization of power is usually preferable to localization of power is not a typically American viewpoint-- in fact, it was that idea that American government was specifically designed to contradict.

That's simply not true. If you are here to argue, then you'll have to find another foil, as I am here to learn and to teach, and not to argue.


This raises a new point that I think deserves discussion. I shall create a topic to discuss it specifically -- but not now, as I am too busy with other tasks.

Rereading this, I concede the wording of my characterization of your positions was not entirely fair, and they do not directly follow from the statements made. In the future, I will do my best to cut and paste quotes rather than rely on my memory or perceptions of the words of others.

This strikes me as the main difference between the Britsih Parliamentary system and the US Congressional System, that the UK has very little regionalism, or even the ability to treat different regions differently. Broadly, all decisions are made at Westminster, the minor exceptions being Scotland and Wales (together comprising around 8 million people out of around 65 million), which have regional decision making bodies with very limited mandates (and no real tax raising powers).

Whilst I think this would work fine in a smaller country of a few million, Britain is probably diverse enough to require greater regionalisation. Whilst it is true that not every parliamentary system HAS to centralise power, they do seem to tend toward doing so.
Certainly one of the strengths of the US seems to be the decentralisation of power down to regional levels. (Although it does strike me that an awful lot of foreign policy making power seems to be concentrated within the executive..)