On Presidentialism

While writing and thinking about the democratic legitimacy of the Referendum, I discovered the work of Juan J Linz. This article initially hosted my thoughts on Linz’s views on the US Presidential system and its clones. I returned to it in the Autumn of 2021 when questions of why the founding fathers did it this way were examined. In the Summer of 2025, inspired by debates about the nature of the EU constitution and its needs to evolve, I had another look at how the US President became so powerful.

Linz & Parliaments

On, my article, Dictatorship and plebiscites I had been pointed at “Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe” a review by Fukiyama of Linz & Stepan’s revised work on Autocracy, which was also referenced by Qvortrup, Here is a mirror, on this site. The Fukiyama piece is very short and more of a plug than a review. I found the Linz paper, and link below, also here are further notes on Presidentialism and Parliaments.

I also found a reference to Mainwaring & Shugart’s “Juan Linz, Presidentialism, and Democracy, A Critical Appraisal 1997, and again here’s a mirror. Linz’s original 1985 article is here, or https://is.gd/BicfCX and here’s my mirror, Linz Presidentialism 1985., I also made a new version with Calibri font. It seems that Juan Linz also wrote a prequel to this paper called “The Perils of Presidentialism”.

Mainwaring and Shugart summarise Linz’s position as follows, although I think the words are mine,

1. In Presidential Systems, the President and the Assembly have competing mandates, with usually no, or incredibly inflexible means of resolving this; parliaments are designed to obviate that! If only by having a general election.
2. Fixed terms Presidencies are a barrier to a change in the popular will of the masses, this is a feature of the nature of coalitions required to win, and the rules of succession which rarely consult the electorate. Parliaments can recall a Premier.
3. Presidencies are a winner takes all system, on often a very narrow mandate; most Parliaments represent the coalitions & dichotomies of interest in society in a better way. Except in the UK where FPTP stops this happening.
4. The power of the Presidents office often does not reflect the strength or more importantly the weakness of the mandate and may be, and often is an on-ramp to authoritarianism
5. It’s more open to outsiders and thus militates against parties which themselves are critical to civic democracy.

Mainwaring and Shugart also produce a number of tables illustrating their critiques of Linz, including one which attempts to correlate poverty with democratic stability. It also would be interesting to see the failures of these classes of rule, India vs (say) Argentina, or more recently Turkey.

Democratic Indices

I wrote, “Democracies don’t have Executive Presidencies“., which looks at the top 20 democracies from the Economist Democracy Index., and “but Democracy” where I look at the lack of controls in the UK constitution to stop the development of a “Strongman” regime. A look at my thinking, wouldn’t be complete without, the following, in which I review the Economist’s index against the UK and find it wanting.

How democratic is the UK?

The conclusions from “Democracies don’t have Executive Presidencies” are interesting because the US has exported its constitution throughout Latin America and it’s powerful presidency imitated or aspired to numerous dictators. It performs an informal correlation between Parliamentary Democracies and Executive Presidencies against a democracy index and finds the latter wanting. (Perhaps I should perform a formal correlation calculation,,)

The history of Mexico’s presidency informs this debate as its means of election and the existence of term limits are in many ways the critical constitutional questions from independence to 1916. There is some thinking and reading to be done about this.

Switzerland

Why is Switzerland different and why does it work for them?

Why was it invented?

So why did the US founding father’s go for this model

1. Hamilton in Federalist No. 70, argues, that unity in the executive branch is a main ingredient for both energy and safety. Energy arises from the proceedings of a single person, characterized by, “decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch,” while safety arises from the unitary executive’s unconcealed accountability to the people …..
2. Others argue that it was based on a misunderstanding of the UK constitution and a misplaced admiration together with a failure to understand its direction of travel
3. Failure to understand Napoleon and Cromwell (& King George III)
4. Underestimated the development of parties & the impact of FPTP on party construction, although it would seem not everyone underestimated parties.

When reviewing this article in the summer of 2025, I found, The Anti-federalists and their important role during the ratification fight from the [US] National Constitution Centre, which summarises the criticisms of the US Constitution, as “The original draft of the Constitution did not have a Bill of Rights, declared all state laws subservient to federal ones, and created a king-like office in the presidency.”

It interests me, again, that the EU subsidiarity debates, rules and treaty clauses, mirror the debates on State vs Federal Authority in the US over 200 years ago, and the EU’s version of the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debate is sort of noted by me in an article called The EU’s sclerosis: fault or feature.

William P Marshall

I found this, by Prof William P Marshall, who shows how the US Presidency has accumulated power, often through crisis, such as the Civil War, the Great Depression and post 9/11. He’s also good on more mundane causes. One of the themes he articulates is the inability of the AG, appointed by the President, to act as both an advisor and a check; I have argued in many cases that this is a fundamental weakness of legal departments, which may be one reason why, in the US, so many special counsel have been appointed. The power of Party is also antithetical to an independent AG, as in 2025, we can see today. (I note that in the States, they have a separate mandate.)

The President leads a federal bureaucracy that, among other powers, sets pollution standards for private industry, regulates labor relations,  creates food and product safety standards, manages the nation’s lands and natural resources, enforces the federal criminal law, oversees the banking industry, and governs a host of other activities too numerous to mention.

Marshall finishes his paper examining the development of Parties and the uber polarisation leading to Congress supporting their party against the constitution, as shown by McConnel’s manipulation of the Supreme Court hearings, and Republican’s resisting the prosecution of Trump for financial corruption and sedition.

He concludes,

The result of all this, I would suggest, is that the system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance.

I add, provoked by The Evolution of the Presidency at ushistory.org, It i.e. the POTUS was founded as subordinate to Congress, it remained so until the 1930s, and FDR and the new deal; this article argues that the crises leading to a stronger presidency were overseen by Andrew Jackson, who invented party cronyism, Abraham Lincoln who developed executive privilege. Theodore Roosevelt & Woodrow Wilson developed the practice of presidential legislative programs and FDR took the Federal Govt into economic management . All of which ignores the early and later rows over debt, money and currency.

I had another look, in the Summer of 2025, and found, https://hls.harvard.edu/today/presidential-power-surges/ which I consider lightweight in comparison to Marshall’s work. This is an anthology, and they conclude, ‘ … the question is not whether a given president has too much power or not enough, but whether—using the metaphor of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ living Constitution—they are right for the time. “The question we should ask is whether, in a given moment, the president’s expansion of executive power is necessary to the survival and flourishing of the body,” Feldman says. That remains an eternal question of U.S. constitutional law.’ and I comment, “This is in my opinion a miserable conclusion. The Senate and Court no longer represent the will of the people and are impediments to progress and democracy. In the case of the Senate, this has always been the case.”

ooOOOoo

These arguments also apply to Britain’s Executive Mayors.

I explore the development of British Presidentialism in

A short history of the British constitution

which links to Impunity and Contempt in Government!

We could also remember, Andrea Ledsom’s quote, the EU has five Presidents and most people can name none of them; perhaps it’s a better way of doing things and several of them are misnamed in my opinion. Often the word Chairman would once have been used, but President is gender neutral and the President of the Council has a role similar to Chief Secretary.

X-ref to this wiki, Subsidiarity and Proportionality, and The EU’s sclerosis: fault or feature.

On the blog, Subsidiarity, representation and human rights, and somewhere, I talk about the US’s need for a constitutional amendment to raise a federal income tax.

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The featured image is a picture of a UN meeting on Climate Change taken from their news site.