The American Way Still Beats Parliamentary Government

T he good old American system of electing our leaders comes in for a lot of grief these days, but looking around the global landscape, the fall of Liz Truss after just 45 days in office is further proof, if any was needed, of the superiority of the American presidential system to parliamentary systems of government. The British Westminster parliamentary system is also used by Israel and by most former British colonies, including Canada, India, and Australia. Other parliamentary systems, such as those of Japan, Germany, and Italy, are distinct from the Westminster system, but each of them shares some of its flaws.

Critics of the American system tend to advance three main arguments: that it’s not democratic enough, that it’s not efficient enough, and that it promotes a polarizing two-party duopoly. The argument about democracy is that the president is elected by 51 popular elections in the states and D.C., which are not evenly weighted, while the Senate is elected by 100 popular elections in the states, which are not close to being evenly weighted. It is therefore not only possible but expected that presidencies and Senate majorities will be built from national popular pluralities or even, at times, minorities.

The argument about efficiency is that parliamentary systems do not have divided government: A majority party or a coalition holds executive power only so long as it has a legislative majority, which is unchecked by the legislative minority and typically faces few checks from the judiciary or from the governments of states, provinces, or localities. The national majority therefore gets its way much more easily.

There are two distinct and contradictory arguments against the two-party system, which arose in America in the 1790s and has been a durable feature of our national and state politics ever since, with only sporadic exceptions. One argument is that the two-party system is too polarizing and leaves more moderate voters with nowhere to go; the other is that having only two parties narrows the scope of debate by taking off the table questions on which the two parties’ disagreements are narrow. The former argument tends to be made with regard to social issues, the latter with regard to issues such as trade, law enforcement, and foreign policy.

Now, there is some truth to all of these critiques. But a glance at how alternative systems of democracy function should remind us of the many virtues of our system. A big one is stability. Sure, it’s frustrating at times when a president is obviously unpopular and incapable, as Joe Biden is today, and we have to wait two more years to be rid of him. But consider the alternative.

Truss is the fourth consecutive Tory prime minister to resign in the middle of her term, and the third of those who thus took office before having ever won a national election. The instability is not just at the top: The British have had six chancellors of the Exchequer since the beginning of 2019, four in 2022 alone — an alarming turnover for an office whose core portfolio is ensuring the confidence and stability of financial markets. The past four years have also seen five leaders of the House of Commons and four foreign secretaries. While this is a period of instability unusual for the British, it is not unprecedented; there were crises in 1782–83, 1827–35, 1846 through 1855, 1922–24, and 1963–64 that saw continuous revolving door ministries, several of which collapsed before they could even form a government.

Israel is set in November to have its fifth national election in four years. No party has received 30 percent in the vote in any of them, and the successive elections keep being called because the coalitions they form are so unstable. Italy, which is proverbial for its instability, is on its seventh prime minister in a decade. The last one, Mario Draghi, was a central banker more or less installed without popular consent. Germany is a notable exception: It had just four chancellors between Helmut Schmidt’s accession in West Germany in 1974 through Angela Merkel’s departure in 2021.

The advantage of the American system of fixed terms for the president is that presidents can do things that may be necessary but unpopular in the short term, and they will not be brought down by scandals that are of far less consequence than the things they were elected to do. In a parliamentary system, Ronald Reagan would likely not have survived the 1982 recession, and the Iran-Contra affair might have driven him from office before he could give his Brandenburg Gate speech and see the victory in the Cold War through to the handoff to George H. W. Bush. Abraham Lincoln’s government might have collapsed after the first battle of Bull Run or at several successive points between the summer of 1862 and the fall of 1864. Voters were not without tools to punish those governments in midterm congressional elections, but the president was given the chance to finish the job he started. Our system may be democratic, but it is also deliberative.

Think of some of the governments we might have had with a parliamentary system, including the abortive reigns of Trent Lott and Bob Livingston. Americans’ understanding of the virtue of stable executive terms explains why most states now have four-year terms for their governors, compared with the one- or two-year terms that were common in the Founding era and through much of the early American republic. By the same token, American presidents can’t call snap elections to take advantage of temporary boosts in popularity.

Parliamentary systems are also not necessarily more democratic. Party leaders are chosen by internal caucus, not popular primary elections. No American president in recent memory has been as unpopular with the general public as Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell have been for much of their legislative tenure. In Canada, Justin Trudeau has remained prime minister after two consecutive elections in which his party got fewer votes than did the Conservatives.

Our two-party system has its critics, but there are good reasons why it has developed organically within our system and resisted many efforts to supplant it. The British have similarly had a two-party system for much of the same period, and its system, for all its flaws, has likewise proven more stable and durable than that of other multiparty parliamentary systems that depend on coalitions. A two-party system creates incentives for each party to strike a balance between disciplining extremes within its ranks and picking up any issues ignored by the other party. Many of our current ills stem from the parties being too weak, rather than too strong.

When our system produces a periodic bipartisan consensus, there are avenues for the voters to blow it up if it becomes unpopular, as Donald Trump’s voters did with free trade or William Jennings Bryan and his faction did with the gold standard — yet, those insurgent movements ultimately find it necessary to become a new establishment within a party that competes for 50 percent of the vote. The binary-choice logic of a two-party system may lead to its share of sins, but it is nonetheless a proven incentive for genuine competition. The gamesmanship of Israeli politics in recent years illustrates how a multiparty system can have the same flaws without the corresponding virtues.

Multiparty systems don’t operate the same way. European systems still have parties of the far right and far left, in ways that we do not, which requires the major parties to choose between forming coalitions with them or ganging up on them to form uniparty coalitions of the center that exclude from public debate issues such as crime and immigration. Neither is healthy. In the proverbial extreme example, Adolf Hitler rose to power after getting 44 percent of the vote in the third election in a year, in which his chief opposition was divided between the socialists and the Communists. More sober nations have simply found that, as Benjamin Disraeli remarked on the eve of the collapse of a ministry that lasted less than a year, “coalitions although successful have always found this, that their triumph has been brief. . . . England does not love coalitions.”

Americans have a better way, if we can keep it.