6 Comments

First of all, thank you very much for your excellent work. We are living the catastrophic consequences of presidentialism like never before. The American exception is no longer exceptional (your book is very persuasive in the fact that is not so exceptional, because the US is not so presidential).

Still I find that the French case shows than non proportional electoral systems are also a problem. The more FPTP is the parliamentarian system, the more “presidentialist”…

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Yes, there are different levels of "presidentialism" . I increasingly think PR is important. My only quibble is that some focus exclusively on that, and I think it's not nearly enough.

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Argument: politics is mostly entertainment, and parliamentarism is boring. One Entertainer In Chief is more entertaining. The peak was probably Hugo Chavez, he was running a TV show several hours per day. Parliamentarism is a bunch of people, most of them not charismatic, talking about numbers.

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Yes, I deeply agree a central weakness of parliamentarism is being boring. But people still do many boring things which are important, and many countries still were able to adopt parliamentarism despite that.

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Dear Tiago, my comments on your book:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uW77FSphM6yiMZTGg/why-not-parliamentarianism-book-by-tiago-ribeiro-dos-santos

If you know about any organized effort to promote parlamentarianism, and I can be of some help, let me know.

Kind Regards,

Arturo

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I haven’t read Mobasher’s book. I did read a book by Maxwell Stearns advocating a parliamentary system and I agree that such systems have advantages. However, the U.S. presidential system is flawed. The intention of the founders was to give the President a base of power independent of Congress so that the President might act as a check on the legislative branch as well as offering a consistent approach to foreign policy, something that is difficult for so fractious a body as a parliament. Our present system, by having the Congress chosen at off-year elections, creates Congresses that represent an electorate protesting the incumbent President and therefore are in constant conflict with the executive branch. Our lack of any vetting mechanism for Presidential candidates creates an advantage for demagogues to gain the office. In the past, the political parties performed this vetting mechanism, but that has fallen into abeyance recently. Reform of our present system so that it could work as originally intended would make a comparison to parliamentary systems more cogent.

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