Voters may like the idea of direct democracy, but as Garett Jones mentions in 10% Less Democracy, most scholars agree that representative democracy produces better outcomes. Similarly, while voters may thrill more to directly choose their top leader, better outcomes come from having voters pick legislators who then pick, and can remove, the top leader.
"I’ve spent a lot of time over the years considering far more radical governance proposals. So the very slow trend toward adopting parliamentary systems seems quite discouraging."
One advantage that radical proposals may have is that being radical helps get attention, useful for marketing.
An important factor in this question is how the parliament itself works and is formed.
If your parliament is uni-cameral, uni-party, without proportional representation... that parliament will become corrupt very swiftly. You can get rid of any single one of these properties and empirically it won't matter A LOT, but if you get rid of all of them, woe betide the citizens of your polity, whose wealth will be extracted and transferred to the tiny ruling clique that dominates the one locus of governmental power.
A bicameral system forces every potential "secret deal" to be put in writing twice, and then survive publicly visible reconciliation.
A multiparty system causes enough adversarial feelings that people at least run their fallacy detection engine on their enemies, and everyone has as least a few enemies to keep them slightly honest.
Proportional representation gives even "kinds of people" who only make up only 5% of the population roughly 5% of the voice in the parliament so these groups do not ONLY have the option of submission or revolt.
ALSO RELEVANT: The prime minister of the one or two houses of parliament will probably make a mediocre commander in chief. In addition to a Senate, and a defacto socially recognized "Princeps Senatus", the Romans had a one or more tribune of the plebs who could veto legislation, and a Senior Consul who ran the army.
In order to make the US military not suck (and maybe out of persnickety completionism?), the constitution COMBINES these jobs into the US president (and then patched the role with legal immunity so that the the incentives faced by Julius Caesar wouldn't apply to the US president (regarding civil wars based on personal loyalty by the army to a very clever commander in chief with a justified fear of future bad faith legal prosecution)).
If there is ONE CLEAR FLAW with US "Popular Consul" elections, I think the flaw is that it simply CANNOT select the Condorcet winner (except in crazy accidents) when a Condorcet winner exists. Condorcet's writings were not widely known and understood when the US was booted up (though he knew Benjamin Franklin and John Adams wrote critiques of his proposals) so perhaps this flaw is understandable.
There was a time when the US president had a lot more power than they currently do, and even then the constitution heavily limited it. A CEO has nearly complete control of the budget, the employees, etc.
The alternative to a single executive is usually running things by a committee. Which I think is almost universally seen as a bad idea. Yet it's how a lot of government actually works.
>it seems they can grab on to power despite much worse performance.
The lack of power might explain that. If you don't have any power, you can't have any responsibility. If a disaster happens, you can just blame all 50 governors, 10 different federal agencies, both branches of congress, etc.
The problem seems more nuanced than presented but I (obviously) have no answer, only some questions.From a narrow perspective, the Canadian parliamentary system, some of the advantages of a parliament seem weaker than advocated. The prime minister is elected by his party before an election and not the legislature. He appoints a cabinet without consent of the legislature who serve at his pleasure. His power is absolute unless parliament defeats the ruling party which is rare. The prime minister is a pol like all other members and not an independent expert subject to dismissal. That is not comparable to a city manager. I don’t know enough to say how much Euro parliaments differ so that the above points become unimportant. As pointed out by someone else (Big Red Scary?) human capital can make a large difference as exemplified even by Euro countries with seemingly similar arrangements but quite different outcomes e.g. Germany and Italy. Statistical comparisons are difficult for that reasosn.
That is a common hypothesis, which is why studies usually include legal origins as a control. Others do not need to do it, because they used a fixed effects approach such that any invariant characteristic such as colonizer will be automatically controlled for. But endogeneity might always be an issue, which is why the book also deals with theory, and auxiliary evidence from companies and municipalities. I think you would like it!
One thing to keep in mind is that parliamentary countries tend to be British colonies and presidential tend to be French colonies. The British tended to be better colonialists and generally left behind better institutions.
Do CEOs really act like strong presidents and dictators, though? Do you perceive that CEOs are able to take decisions which will clearly and transparently hurt the interests of shareholders the same way a dictator, or a strong president, can do to the citizens of their countries? What I see is that any minor scandal will have a CEO removed, or any really bad business performance. With presidents - and no less with dictators - it seems they can grab on to power despite much worse performance.You may argue that the capacity that a CEO has to order something and see it actually get done is much greater than a president and a dictator. That is correct, but also correct of prime ministers. Indeed, theory predicts that the power to ultimately hire and fire the leader allows for the representatives to be much more relaxed about the amount of leeway they give to the executive officer.
My puzzle is the following: companies have tried all sorts of governance arrangements. Why are there no big companies which directly elect their CEO and not let him be fired by the Board? I don't see this as decisive evidence in favor of parliaments, but it does seem as decisive evidence against directly electing CEOs.
>parliamentary politics—an assembly in which political actions were discussed and deliberated and in which executive officials were held responsible
This may have been true at one time. It doesn't seem to be a remotely reasonable description of parliaments in the present day. I wonder what changed. I would guess the dominance of political parties hurts democracies a lot.
The current trend is for proportional representation systems which bake political parties directly into the system. It seems to me it would be better to do proportional representation on individuals. If you get 10% of the population to vote for you, you get 10% of the votes. Seems simliar to weighted votes in corporate elections.
I could see myself voting for individuals I think are intelligent and responsible. In a way that I would never vote for the political party that that individual joins.
So what exactly is the important part of parliaments that make them work? I find it very interesting you bring up corporations. Corporations have super strong CEOs that act basically like strong presidents or dictators. Most democracies do not give their executives anywhere near that much power. Is it only important that the executive is elected by board members instead of all shareholders?
Not Robin, but the answers implied by summary are:
1) Because the executive is selected by the legislature, rather than by the people directly. The parliament picks the prime minister, and the council picks the city manager. The prime minister and manager both run the government administration.
2) No, but then the whole argument is for marginal gains. It's entirely possible that the causal mechanism is "interferes with growth less" rather than "drives growth more" but when comparing between systems these are equivalent.
I guess the theoretical justification is that there might be some benefit to create some gridlock, I mean to "checking the power of the legislature", without creating a too-strong executive. I suppose one could accomplish gridlock by creating multiple legislative chambers, each elected by different electorates (national vote, congressional districts, statewide elections, etc.) and each with different and concurrent powers. One could also require super-majorities for certain actions. In fact, one could view the Electoral College (as originally envisioned by the Founders) as a third chamber of Congress whose sole power is to choose the Prime Minister. Finally, although one could in principle impose a term limit on the Prime Minister separate from a party's control of the legislature, does this happen in practice in many parliamentary systems?
I would think that if one were maximizing some function of goodness over some range of inputs 0-10, one would *not* by default assume that the optimal lied at either extreme without some justification. That would especially be true when trying to "balance" powers of various factions. (Choosing different legislative chambers and the executive with different electorates makes it more likely that these chambers are controlled by different factions.) Isn't that what "balancing" means?
Thanks, citizen15. The author here. Indeed this has been discussed. Shugart and Carey, in 1992, argued that as long as the president is weak enough, it was not harmful, and they envisaged some benefits. Funnily, when I tweeted a short summary of my book, I "@ted" Shugart and mentioned this study. He corrected me saying that since 2010 he does not believe that presidents have any benefits, but that he still maintains that the weaker the better.
With respect to conflating very different systems, I agree, and that was my point - people do it all the time. We call all Latin American countries presidential and we do the same for South Korea and the United States, without a second thought. My book tries to show these systems are very different - and this is not due only to levels of democracy, culture, or norms, but that constitutional rules about the power of the executive play an outsized role.
Lastly, it is conceivable that there is a quadratic relationship between "good outcomes" and "executive-legislative" power relations, but do we not need some empirical and theoretical justification to posit that instead of the more simple linear relationship?
"I’ve spent a lot of time over the years considering far more radical governance proposals. So the very slow trend toward adopting parliamentary systems seems quite discouraging."
One advantage that radical proposals may have is that being radical helps get attention, useful for marketing.
An important factor in this question is how the parliament itself works and is formed.
If your parliament is uni-cameral, uni-party, without proportional representation... that parliament will become corrupt very swiftly. You can get rid of any single one of these properties and empirically it won't matter A LOT, but if you get rid of all of them, woe betide the citizens of your polity, whose wealth will be extracted and transferred to the tiny ruling clique that dominates the one locus of governmental power.
A bicameral system forces every potential "secret deal" to be put in writing twice, and then survive publicly visible reconciliation.
A multiparty system causes enough adversarial feelings that people at least run their fallacy detection engine on their enemies, and everyone has as least a few enemies to keep them slightly honest.
Proportional representation gives even "kinds of people" who only make up only 5% of the population roughly 5% of the voice in the parliament so these groups do not ONLY have the option of submission or revolt.
ALSO RELEVANT: The prime minister of the one or two houses of parliament will probably make a mediocre commander in chief. In addition to a Senate, and a defacto socially recognized "Princeps Senatus", the Romans had a one or more tribune of the plebs who could veto legislation, and a Senior Consul who ran the army.
In order to make the US military not suck (and maybe out of persnickety completionism?), the constitution COMBINES these jobs into the US president (and then patched the role with legal immunity so that the the incentives faced by Julius Caesar wouldn't apply to the US president (regarding civil wars based on personal loyalty by the army to a very clever commander in chief with a justified fear of future bad faith legal prosecution)).
If there is ONE CLEAR FLAW with US "Popular Consul" elections, I think the flaw is that it simply CANNOT select the Condorcet winner (except in crazy accidents) when a Condorcet winner exists. Condorcet's writings were not widely known and understood when the US was booted up (though he knew Benjamin Franklin and John Adams wrote critiques of his proposals) so perhaps this flaw is understandable.
There was a time when the US president had a lot more power than they currently do, and even then the constitution heavily limited it. A CEO has nearly complete control of the budget, the employees, etc.
The alternative to a single executive is usually running things by a committee. Which I think is almost universally seen as a bad idea. Yet it's how a lot of government actually works.
>it seems they can grab on to power despite much worse performance.
The lack of power might explain that. If you don't have any power, you can't have any responsibility. If a disaster happens, you can just blame all 50 governors, 10 different federal agencies, both branches of congress, etc.
One way to think about the issue is that a parliment represents a type of hierarchical election with two levels: parliment and president.
The problem seems more nuanced than presented but I (obviously) have no answer, only some questions.From a narrow perspective, the Canadian parliamentary system, some of the advantages of a parliament seem weaker than advocated. The prime minister is elected by his party before an election and not the legislature. He appoints a cabinet without consent of the legislature who serve at his pleasure. His power is absolute unless parliament defeats the ruling party which is rare. The prime minister is a pol like all other members and not an independent expert subject to dismissal. That is not comparable to a city manager. I don’t know enough to say how much Euro parliaments differ so that the above points become unimportant. As pointed out by someone else (Big Red Scary?) human capital can make a large difference as exemplified even by Euro countries with seemingly similar arrangements but quite different outcomes e.g. Germany and Italy. Statistical comparisons are difficult for that reasosn.
That is a common hypothesis, which is why studies usually include legal origins as a control. Others do not need to do it, because they used a fixed effects approach such that any invariant characteristic such as colonizer will be automatically controlled for. But endogeneity might always be an issue, which is why the book also deals with theory, and auxiliary evidence from companies and municipalities. I think you would like it!
One thing to keep in mind is that parliamentary countries tend to be British colonies and presidential tend to be French colonies. The British tended to be better colonialists and generally left behind better institutions.
Do CEOs really act like strong presidents and dictators, though? Do you perceive that CEOs are able to take decisions which will clearly and transparently hurt the interests of shareholders the same way a dictator, or a strong president, can do to the citizens of their countries? What I see is that any minor scandal will have a CEO removed, or any really bad business performance. With presidents - and no less with dictators - it seems they can grab on to power despite much worse performance.You may argue that the capacity that a CEO has to order something and see it actually get done is much greater than a president and a dictator. That is correct, but also correct of prime ministers. Indeed, theory predicts that the power to ultimately hire and fire the leader allows for the representatives to be much more relaxed about the amount of leeway they give to the executive officer.
My puzzle is the following: companies have tried all sorts of governance arrangements. Why are there no big companies which directly elect their CEO and not let him be fired by the Board? I don't see this as decisive evidence in favor of parliaments, but it does seem as decisive evidence against directly electing CEOs.
Yes, according to the book the key point is that there is a board or parliament with power to fire the ruler at any time.
>parliamentary politics—an assembly in which political actions were discussed and deliberated and in which executive officials were held responsible
This may have been true at one time. It doesn't seem to be a remotely reasonable description of parliaments in the present day. I wonder what changed. I would guess the dominance of political parties hurts democracies a lot.
The current trend is for proportional representation systems which bake political parties directly into the system. It seems to me it would be better to do proportional representation on individuals. If you get 10% of the population to vote for you, you get 10% of the votes. Seems simliar to weighted votes in corporate elections.
I could see myself voting for individuals I think are intelligent and responsible. In a way that I would never vote for the political party that that individual joins.
So what exactly is the important part of parliaments that make them work? I find it very interesting you bring up corporations. Corporations have super strong CEOs that act basically like strong presidents or dictators. Most democracies do not give their executives anywhere near that much power. Is it only important that the executive is elected by board members instead of all shareholders?
Not Robin, but the answers implied by summary are:
1) Because the executive is selected by the legislature, rather than by the people directly. The parliament picks the prime minister, and the council picks the city manager. The prime minister and manager both run the government administration.
2) No, but then the whole argument is for marginal gains. It's entirely possible that the causal mechanism is "interferes with growth less" rather than "drives growth more" but when comparing between systems these are equivalent.
I think you would like the book:)
I guess the theoretical justification is that there might be some benefit to create some gridlock, I mean to "checking the power of the legislature", without creating a too-strong executive. I suppose one could accomplish gridlock by creating multiple legislative chambers, each elected by different electorates (national vote, congressional districts, statewide elections, etc.) and each with different and concurrent powers. One could also require super-majorities for certain actions. In fact, one could view the Electoral College (as originally envisioned by the Founders) as a third chamber of Congress whose sole power is to choose the Prime Minister. Finally, although one could in principle impose a term limit on the Prime Minister separate from a party's control of the legislature, does this happen in practice in many parliamentary systems?
I would think that if one were maximizing some function of goodness over some range of inputs 0-10, one would *not* by default assume that the optimal lied at either extreme without some justification. That would especially be true when trying to "balance" powers of various factions. (Choosing different legislative chambers and the executive with different electorates makes it more likely that these chambers are controlled by different factions.) Isn't that what "balancing" means?
Thanks, citizen15. The author here. Indeed this has been discussed. Shugart and Carey, in 1992, argued that as long as the president is weak enough, it was not harmful, and they envisaged some benefits. Funnily, when I tweeted a short summary of my book, I "@ted" Shugart and mentioned this study. He corrected me saying that since 2010 he does not believe that presidents have any benefits, but that he still maintains that the weaker the better.
With respect to conflating very different systems, I agree, and that was my point - people do it all the time. We call all Latin American countries presidential and we do the same for South Korea and the United States, without a second thought. My book tries to show these systems are very different - and this is not due only to levels of democracy, culture, or norms, but that constitutional rules about the power of the executive play an outsized role.
Lastly, it is conceivable that there is a quadratic relationship between "good outcomes" and "executive-legislative" power relations, but do we not need some empirical and theoretical justification to posit that instead of the more simple linear relationship?
When a category of spending gets more efficient and cost-effective, you expect to see higher spending in that category.