The poverty of the case for presidents

Nobody cares to ask "Why Presidentialism?"

Parliament of Mexico

The title of my book and this blog is an invitation to suspend the general skepticism regarding parliamentarism and evaluate it the way we evaluate other proposals (like capitalism and socialism). Extending the exercise, we should also ask: what is the case for presidentialism? Why should we maintain our support for so many countries stick to this system?

As I write in the book, the academic case for presidentialism is basically non-existent. Cheibub is considered the greatest authority for undermining the case for parliamentarism (readers of the book will recall I dispute he is persuasive), but even Cheibub never argues that presidentialism is better than parliamentarism. He only says that there isn’t such a difference. Persson and Tabellini argue in favor of separation of powers (also unconvingly, I claim), but they never address a key condition for presidentialism, so important in fact that no country which does not fulfill it is called presidential: the personalization of executive power.

The argument from tradition

An argument which became famous some years ago is Chesterton’s fence. According to this, one should not remove a fence if they don’t know its purpose. They should first learn the purpose and, if the conclusion is that it is not necessary anymore, then remove the fence. That is, if a practice evolved traditionally and we don’t really know how it became widespread and why, then the burden of proof for showing it is unnecessary falls upon those who want to change the practice. So, perhaps, we shouldn’t mess with presidentialism because it is part of tradition.

As an aside, I must say don’t find the argument usually convincing, and I believe nobody really does either. If we had to know what the people who invented some practice were thinking every time we proposed some change, we would condemn ourselves to stagnation. We used to have socities which behaved much like that, and they had very little progress. It was only after the innovation culture of the Enlightenment spread that the world entered the era of unparalleled progress we live in. My sensation is that people only selectively cry “Chesterton’s fence” when they can’t justify resisting a specific change. Change the subject, and the same people will remove fences without blinking.

But even if you find the argument persuasive, it doesn’t apply here. Presidentialism isn’t traditional in the sense of an evolved pracice which we don’t know the origins. It is only traditional in the sense that it has been practiced for quite some time now. We know how presidentialism came about. Montesquieu wrote “The Spirit of Law”, Americans used that to create a first version of presidentialism, and Bolivar used the American precedent to create the presidentialism which is most commonly applied in many parts of the world, notably Latin America and Africa. Presidentialism is not the result of tradition, it is the result of very old, very flawed, social engineering.

So why presidentialism?

This means that asking why should a country stick to presidentialism is absolutely relevant. What my experience debating this issue has revealed is that the arguments in favor of presidentialism, those which most people who do not support parliamentarism inevitably believe, are not to be found in the literature, because they are too incoherent to be published. The type of arguments people present are not in favor of a system of separation of powers, a collective legislature and a personalized presidency. They are arguments in favor of presidents against parliaments.

The conversations are almost always the same. I will present the case for parliamentarism, I will talk about the theory, the evidence, all of it. People will immediately retort: “that’s all well and good, but have you seen country X’s Congress? They are a bunch of [corrupt/incompetent/parochial/unaccountable/all of that together] politicians.” Let’s put aside that I don’t think presidents are better in any of those dimensions. The question I raise is this: if all of that is true, why should there be a Congress at all?

This tends to inflict cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, they believe deep down that parliaments - or at least the parliament we are talking about - is indeed as bad as they first claimed. But at a gut level they also realize that not having an elected parliament would open up all sorts of authoritarian possibilities for the president.

People usually don’t get to the point I’m going to make, but they could argue that the separation of powers is essential. OK, then why not have a personalized legislature and judiciary in the same way as the executive? We would have a president of the executive, a president of the legislature (also able to appoint and remove all of their “cabinet”) and a president of the judiciary with similar powers.

I have never seen anyone proposing any of these possible arrangements. Neither to have a single person concentrate all of the power, nor have three people heads of the executive, legislative and judiciary. Not in writing, nor in conversation. And I have heard or read all sorts of proposals.

So, no matter how [corrupt etc.] people think a parliament is, they still recognize, at some level, that it plays an essential role. And that means they have a much, much, harder task than I do. I try to demonstrate that the simple solution “parliaments should have the power to define government, in all its aspects” is the better one. Besides its simplicity, this solution has plenty of theory of evidence in its favor already. Their task, however, is to show that whatever the balance of powers between presidents and parliaments which has been implemented in a country just happens to be close to the optimal one, even though it is a relationship which varies considerably from country to country, and whose variation has little to do with Chestertonian trial and error and a lot to do with what the elites of the country understood at a theoretical level would be best at the time the constitutions were written.

A daunting task. I can’t see why we should still give proponents of presidentialism the benefit of doubt before they successfully complete it.