Parliamentarism vs. Presidentialism

Full Transcript:

Introduction:

There are broadly speaking two forms of government. Parliamentarism and Presidentialism. The main difference is that in a parliamentary system the government depends on the support of parliament, the confidence of parliament and it is accountable to that parliament. While a president in a presidential system is elected by the people for a fixed term and does not depend on parliament, but is mainly accountable to the people. Examples of parliamentary systems are the United Kingdom, Germany, or South Africa. Examples for presidential systems are the USA, Brazil, Chile or Nigeria. 

My guest in this episode of the Rules of the Game podcast is Tiago Santos, who has written the book titled “Why not parliamentarism?”. He is convinced that parliamentarism is the superior form of government and describes his arguments in the book in detail. While it is nearly impossible to make a causal argument in this regard, plenty of statistics in the book show that parliamentary systems perform really well in welfare terms. 

Together we discuss what are the important differences between the two systems, what are possible advantages and disadvantages, and about his opinion on whether the electoral law, for instance proportional representation matters when it comes to the well-functioning of the government system.

We strongly agreed on the point that the discussion of this subject matter should be way more public and prominent across the globe. Tiago’s motivation to write the book was first of all to contribute to that public discussion. Parliamentarism and the form of government is also pretty much absent in development economics or economic growth research, even though it seems to make such a big difference.

Tiago Santos has been a Brazilian career diplomat since 2007 and has worked at the World Bank until quite recently. He has a law degree from Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Rio de Janeiro, a professional degree from Instituto Rio Branco (Brazil’s national diplomatic academy), and a master’s degree from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. None of the opinions here or in the book reflect the views of any institution he has been associated with.

I am your host, Stephan Kyburz, and this is the episode of my podcast The Rules of the Game. I am a political economist with a PhD in Economics from the University of Bern in Switzerland. And I previously held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Center for Global Development.

You find a full transcript of the conversation on my website rulesofthegame.blog. If you enjoy this episode, please leave a review on your preferred podcast platform and share it with friends and colleagues. 

Now please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Tiago Santos.

Interview:

Stephan Kyburz: Tiago Santos, very welcome to the Rules of the Game Podcast. I’m very happy to have you on the show.

Tiago Santos: Thanks for having me.

Stephan Kyburz: So as usual I start with the first question that I pose to all my guests: what is your first memory of democracy?

Tiago Santos: Ah, that’s a great question. I have to say my first memory of democracy was when I was 8 years old. It was the first presidential campaign in Brazil. My parents were very engaged politically so they took me to a rally and I thought it was a beautiful thing. Brazil was coming out of a 20 year dictatorship and this was the first presidential election in a very long time and everybody was just very, very thrilled with the idea of being able to vote and having democracy back again. So it’s a very fond memory.

Stephan Kyburz: Cool. Yeah, that’s a very beautiful memory and that was pretty much in the 1980s, right?

Tiago Santos: 1989

Stephan Kyburz: Ah yes, the first election was in 1989. And did that in any way kind of push your motivation, or where did your motivation to write your book “Why not parliamentarism?” come from? What created this motivation to write that book?

Tiago Santos: So actually not, I was always a kid that was very engaged politically, I was always interested since that day and during my teenage years I was always very interested in political issues. But the Motivation for the book is much, much more recent. I talk about this a little bit in the book itself. So when I joined as an advisor at the board of directors at the World Bank, my former boss back then, Otaviano Canuto, invited me to write an article on the economic effects of the Brazilian constitution. And then I would research all these things that could affect the Brazilian economy because of the constitution that we had. And then one inescapable aspect was that, well, Brazil has a presidential constitution and so many other countries have a different one. I started doing research on this and it became very large already so it would not fit the article and I just was so dumbfounded by the effects, the amount of evidence that I was finding and the many research areas from political science and economics and history that would point to this direction that I felt somewhat of a responsibility to write it. I thought that this is something for the amount of evidence that we have, for the size of the effects that we’re talking about, that we do not have nearly as many people talking about it as we should. So I see myself as a person that’s trying to only make the issues more known. I’m not very original in my book, I tried to take as much from research from others as possible. So that was it. I was thinking that the world not only was missing out on opportunity to significantly improve people’s lives, but as I became more convinced that we are also seeing a phenomenon that Poguntke and Webb, those names are hard to say, are talking about the presidentialization of politics. So we’re seeing that we are moving further away from the idea of parliamentarism. So I thought that someone should sound the alarm.

Stephan Kyburz: I think the book is actually very interesting. It’s very nice to read because you bring in a lot of different aspects around this question and I think your motivation to write the book was probably quite similar to my motivation to start this podcast because I always thought like somehow we already know a lot, we know a lot about institutions. Maybe we don’t know so much about the evolution of institutions and kind of these critical junctures and how we bring about institutional change. But we kind of know a lot about, you know, which institutions are more successful than others; or which institutions bring more balance into the political system. And I think that’s really a central question and also we can come back to the question of, you know, why don’t we see more of this discussion. But first maybe for the listeners, can you quickly recap in what’s in your opinion kind of what are the main characteristics of parliamentarism compared to presidentialism and why, what are your main arguments why parliamentarianism is the better form of government.

Tiago Santos: All right. So I like that you ask my opinion because there are different definitions of parliamentarism. The one that I use is I think a very broad one and I think it’s pretty well defined as executive subordination to the legislature. So if you have elements of that any characteristic that means some more subordination of the executive to the legislature, it means that the country is more parliamentarist and then there’s less of it. So there are gradations, there is a continuum between parliamentarism and presidentialism. But you also can speak meaningfully of a presidential country and a parliamentary country because these characteristics tend to lump together. This is not as widely shared as I would hope. There are some people that are much more strict so you have thinkers like Cheibub that thinks that the confidence procedure is the main characteristic of parliamentarism is the defining issue. I disagree with that view. I think that for example, the choice of the head of the executive by the legislature is as important as that. So there are different definitions. I think that mine is pretty broad and meaningful enough and I like it. So you were asking what the benefits are, right?

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, or kind of what makes you believe or think why is parliamentarianism is better. Like what are kind of the main, you know, empirical results maybe that we know or how do you derive your opinion on that?

Tiago Santos: Okay, so there’s this political scientist on Twitter Mark Copelovitch who says that everything is in Linz, Juan Linz, the rest is commentary. So it’s a joke and I think that he’s onto something. I think that the main arguments are already there and what we have now and we’re gonna get to is a lot more evidence. So I think we should start with Linz’s argument, which is that presidentialism has many perils, has many failures that parliamentarianism does not have and still can keep that democratic nature. So the first one is the dual legitimacy. So that there is a legitimacy that the president has and the legitimacy of the parliament and they both can claim, truly, that they represent the whole of the people. And this means that there is no systematic way for us to sort who is above the other and then they will fight, they will use that, they will charge the people against one another. And this means that the politics becomes a lot more dysfunctional because of this aspect. The other thing is that the winner-take-all-aspects of it. So if you have a parliamentary election, even if there’s a party that’s majoritarian, there’s enough differences between the members of parliament that there’s always going to be some negotiation, a lot of negotiation for the positions to be pushed through. Whereas by its very nature presidentialism holds all the presidential powers, which is a lot of power, in the hands of a single person. And this means that not only will you want your group to achieve the presidency because of all the benefits that are associated with that. But you really don’t want to be in the group that loses the presidential elections because there’s so much harm that derives from that to your group. So polarization increases dramatically because you only have the incentive to win the presidency and then everything will be sorted out. You don’t have to negotiate with the other groups anymore, you’re sort of out of the risk. So that’s a very important one.

Stephan Kyburz: And also maybe one, just to chip in here quickly, also the presidential government is much more hierarchical usually than the parliamentary, right? If you have like parliamentarism usually has a more collegial kind of coalition government and the coalition kind of works on solutions like legislative solutions, while in presidential systems we have a more strong hierarchy. So we have a president who has kind of a lot of power just vested in his office and that usually appoints the whole cabinet, right? And also I mean a lot of cabinet positions in the US, for example, still need to be confirmed by the senate, right? But in many other countries the presidential appointments are pretty much secured. So the president has a lot of power. So as I also from your book as you write the US presidential system is actually not even one of the very representative systems in terms of how much power is vested in the president, because in the US system the congress still is kind of a strong check on the president while in other presidential systems the president has even more power in his office. Would you agree to that?

Tiago Santos: Yes, completely. So the Congress in the US has historically a lot of power; still has a lot more power than the typical congress in Latin America or African countries that have a lot of presidential constitutions. And for example, as you said the confirmation thing, the power over the purse, the power of the purse that the Congress has in the US is not the same as in many Latin American countries. Other appointments to public companies and even Woodrow Wilson the first PhD with a political science PhD that became president called the system the US has congressional government. So you even have on that a very different aspect than what Simon Bolivar, the person responsible for the independence of many Latin American countries, said that we would have elected kings with the name of presidents in Latin America and when he said kings he meant kings before parliamentarianism. The kings that had a lot of power. So think that you have a Louis 14 in each Latin American country and that happens to be elected. But many of the pairs are the same. So you’re absolutely right that the US has a very atypical presidential system.

Stephan Kyburz: And you mentioned the rigidity. What did you, like just before I interrupted you, what was that thought?

Tiago Santos: So it’s also part of Linz’s thesis that you have a problem with rigidity in presidential systems. So, in Germany for example, Angela Merkel is considered a very good prime minister. She can stay there for many, many years and not be considered a threat to democracy because of all the benefits of parliamentarism; that they can remove her at any time if they want so she was in Germany, she led Germany for many, many years. Where I’ve seen presidential systems, you will always have some limit to re-election because if you don’t have a limit to re-election the president will naturally accumulate so much power over him that he will never leave. So since the beginning of the presidential system you have limits to re-election. So you have a time that he must leave; so he can stay more if it’s good enough and yet if the president is doing really badly, you also can’t remove that person very easily. So the rigidity is something that really makes it very hard for a country to adjust its directions given changes in circumstances, changes in the opinion of the capacity that the president has to have enough support; the competence that he has on economic and political and military issues, all sorts of things. So you have a situation where the political class does not see the president as a leader anymore, a competent leader that can promote the proper changes, but yet they must stay there and these reforms that must to be passed don’t get passed and that sort of thing. So rigidity is a very bad feature of presidentialism and of course in the parliamentary system, you have, many have the possibility of calling elections, early elections. So even parliament is dissolved but you always will have the capacity to appoint the prime minister; very often you have the capacity to remove the prime minister at any given time and this allows for a lot more flexibility. And so the fourth characteristic that I would talk about is the personalism. So whereas in parliamentary systems, you think of the government as a collective thing, as a collective endeavor and in presidential systems it’s very easy to equalize the government with the person of the president. And that has all sorts of risks. The loyalty is much more prized than capacity to solve problems and being competent. And personalism very often increases the polarization that we talked about earlier and has many other challenges to do, anti-corruption and that sort of thing. So you see many problems with presidentialism. So this is I think is very much the current. his is very much current. Cheibub, who is an author I talked about already, challenged under the coalition part, that you mentioned. But even if it’s true that presidential countries do have coalitions, these coalitions are not nearly as strong as the coalitions that happen to appear in parliamentary countries because they get to decide everything. Whereas in presidential systems these coalitions are very often an exchange of small favors that the president has to have the minimum support so that he can promote his agenda. So it’s the nature of the coalitions that are very different.

Stephan Kyburz: Yes, and also I think, like in general to me it seems always like institutions that kind of divide power or share power among different persons in the same political body are usually more balanced and come to probably even better decisions. And in presidential systems you have kind of the president that kind of attracts all the attention, while for me always what happens in parliaments is actually way more important because that’s really the legislative body. And something I don’t really understand is why don’t parliaments take more power away from presidents. Because also in your book you say that you know in most presidential systems, the presidents have even more power than for example in the US.

Tiago Santos: It’s the president has the immediate ability to name and fire so many people and he’s responsible for executing the budget. And I think that he’s able to do a strategy of divide and conquer. So any member of parliament that would try to remove powers from the president would have a hard time, because the president has so many capabilities to provide incentives, let’s just say it that way, for the the congress people that they just feel it’s not very realistic. But having said that, I do think that there is a struggle, there is an involving relationship. So sometimes the president would have a lot of popularity and here we will rely on his popular support to encroach parliament. But sometimes parliaments do stand up to presidents and are able to negotiate to a constitutional bargaining of sorts. Roger Congleton tells about how constitutions evolved more than they were implemented all at once. And this happened more in monarchies than in presidential countries. And I haven’t developed this idea very much yet, but I think there’s some sort of presidential trap. So because you have to renovate the president every time, it is hard for the repeated games, the iterated games that parliament and the president would play, and that a king and parliament play to come up with mutually beneficial solutions, which would lead to a gradual increase of parliamentary power. In a presidential system this is really hard because the president has a fixed mandate. He has to take all of the benefits that he can in a very short amount of time. So it’s hard, and then there comes a new president and he will want all the power that he can have.

Stephan Kyburz: One thing that to me is very important is also the electoral system. So when you say “why not parliamentarism?”, I would say “why not proportional representation?”. So it seems that the balance of power also within parliament is really important and what is the kind of party landscape in parliament, also affects how successful parliamentarism is, I would say. Because you see like a parliament with majoritarian elections like single-seat plurality elections, like we have in the UK, you end up with fewer parties, like bigger parties. And that is compared to a system, which is more proportional like for example in Germany where you have more, smaller parties that build a coalition. So one danger I see in parliamentary systems is when they are combined with majoritarian elections, it that it really gives, you have a majority of one party in parliament, it gives the government a whole lot of power. Do you have any thoughts on that, because in the book you mention it, but you don’t discuss it much. I’m just curious whether you think just parliamentarianism is more important than the electoral system itself.

Tiago Santos: I do think parliamentarism is more important, and this comes from being from Latin America. So many countries in Latin America do have a proportional representation system, including Brazil and we see that the perils of presidentialism are still there. There was even a time that some people that make the charge that proportional representation is particularly dangerous in a presidential country. But I’m not going into that discussion. I just think that given that the history, given the framework that I use for my book. The amount of evidence from the sanity check, if we look at the countries today which are doing the best in terms of development, democracy, also other things are they naturally proportional representation, I don’t think so. Because you have many countries that are from British colonies, Australia or Canada and the UK itself has developed tremendously under the majoritarian system. So I’m not saying that I don’t like proportional representation, I do like it. I just think that it’s not as decisive as we think I that it might be harming current parliamentary countries, yes I think that it might be harming. But it’s not the kind of harm that is unsurmountable. We see that majoritarian countries can still do very well. Whereas presidential countries with proportional representation are still struggling a lot to get out of the middle income trap to consolidate their democracies. So if I take a look at the historical evidence, the statistical evidence I think that parliamentarism has a lot more going for it than proportional representation. I’m not against that, it wouldn’t be my priority.

Stephan Kyburz: Okay, yeah, that’s interesting and because I recently always thought like you know, proportional representation is so important. But I think the next few years will be quite interesting to see how the two different systems also develop, because I’m wondering you know in the UK what’s going to happen with the Conservatives because they really seem to concentrate a lot of power in their hands and they also have a tendency now to, you know, kind of change the rules of the game. And also on the other side, for example in Brazil I’m curious to see what happens, because whether a proportional representation can kind of keep the president in check, you know. But that’s kind of and maybe another discussion for a later moment. One thing I’m curious is, you know in development discussions, these fundamental institutional questions like the form of government, like parliamentarism versus presidentialism. They just don’t seem to be a very like central topic. Do you know why that is? Is this more like that development questions usually evolve around policies and economic questions rather than political institutional questions?

Tiago Santos: I agree that they don’t happen nearly as much as they should and I’m still a little bit puzzled as to why they don’t. I don’t think that they are that threatening. So there are many issues that involve a lot more sensitive topics. You think of anti-corruption. So you if you think of many international organizations are directly involved in anti-corruption initiatives and these initiatives very often will involve some of the leaders, some of the the political leaders of the country and they still think that it’s worth to pursue that avenue. So it’s it puzzles me why form of government is not more explored. I think and then this comes from talking to many people from seeing that people really don’t realize the difference that it makes people think oh maybe parliamentarianism is a little bit better than presidentialism. But it’s like the metric system for the US. Maybe the US should adopt a metric system but that’s not what’s holding a country back right? You wouldn’t make adopting the metric system the number one priority that you would have. For any single country, and I think that that’s what people see about presidentialism and parliamentarism. And they just don’t realize or maybe they disagree with my thesis, I’m not saying that I have all of the truth, but I think that they don’t realize how large this is.

Stephan Kyburz: I would totally agree with that. I think also that because development questions are often kind of researched on by economists, I think the political economy aspect, and especially the political aspect, not even the political economy aspect but you know the form of government the fundamental institutional questions are not talked about enough and I think we totally agree on this point, that it should have way more space in the international discussion even though one thing that is probably tricky, or two points even: the first is that bringing about institutional change is hard. So I don’t know like advisors or like be kind of in international organizations, they are maybe reluctant to even talk about it because they know it’s really hard to bring about change, and also obviously the question of a country’s kind of, you know, sovereignty or non-interference. So it’s for sure, it’s kind of also a kind of critical topic I would say. But definitely in general, we should see a lot more a discussion around it, because I think also the people should know more about these different systems.

Tiago Santos: You know I agree with you the view that the economists don’t pay enough attention to this and I completely agree. And I was thinking of a syllogism the other day, which is funny that people don’t make it very often. Economists are very aware that institutions are central to development, right? So since Acemoglu and Robinson published “Why Nations Fail”, it became mainstream economics. And whereas in political science oeople are very aware that presidentialism is very harmful to the political environment. So if we just connect these two and we say okay of course the political environment is very connected to institutions so they will affect each other, so of course it has to be that if the form of government is as important to the politics of a country, as the political scientists seem to agree, and if institutions are as important to development as economists seem to agree, that it has to be the case that the form of government is very, very important for development. So I think that this little click of communication between political scientists and economists would be enough for people to move a lot more in that direction.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah for sure. Also I think even even in political science that the public discussion could be much stronger on institutional questions. I think what we kind of see for example now in the US, also with the, you know, related to the electoral law. There is now a huge discussion but it kind of was hidden a bit in academic circles before coming really to the public forum. And I think these questions are fundamental. Also obviously we see that especially European countries with parliamentary systems, but also for me as I said proportional representation, which is very important. These two topics you know they are pretty well spread in Europe and we see European countries have developed very fair and more equitable societies. And at the same time, for example in African countries, we see that most countries have both a presidential system. Well yeah, at least many have majoritarian elections and many also have a presidential system. And I think, I can’t understand why this is not part of the central discussion.

Tiago Santos: Yeah, I’m still puzzled too. And you mentioned Africa, and it’s remarkable that Botswana, one of the three countries  that have been consistently parliamentary, has been developing the fastest in Africa. So that this doesn’t strike out to many people as well, maybe there’s something there, it’s something that I’m still puzzled by.

Stephan Kyburz: So what is your hope with your book. You know I think with your book you wanted to start a discussion on that topic, which I strongly support and what is kind of your hope where this discussion would lead to? Or what are the avenues that you know people who are interested in, that could go down?

Tiago Santos: So I would really like to see more research on this. So I think that this is, although we have a lot of evidence for it, we could still do a lot more research on this. So if we compare, and I always like to compare it to democracy, because democracy is something that is so present in everyone’s lives. So if we look at the amount of research that we have for democracy compared to parliamentarism, parliamentarism is really small. And I think that the size of the effects are comparable. So I would like to see a lot more research. I would like to see more people engaged in trying to promote the sort of legislation, the sort of initiative that would make a country more parliamentary, even if they cannot change the constitution overnight. But just to talk about parliament in a better light would be already better. We always and parliament seems to be the punchbag of every democracy in the world. It feels like oh people love democracy if only parliament wouldn’t stand in the way. And then well, if you love democracy then you should really love a parliament. Even if you don’t like a specific member of parliament, which of course we won’t always like all the members of parliament, that the institution itself should be more protected, should be more promoted and that’s the kind of thing, as you said, I would really like to spark a discussion on this. I wouldn’t want to see huge changes happening overnight but not to discuss this at this point, I feel it’s like not discussing climate change. That’s the sort of effect size that I think this has. This is urgent.

Stephan Kyburz: And sometimes I even think and like NGOs that are engaged in democracy like, that are fighting for democracy, are even also not discussing it like enough. Because for me, it’s like such a central issue, together with the electoral law.

Tiago Santos: Exactly yeah exactly and it’s of course and that’s something that I think is even counterproductive, because often these NGOs they do a great job of promoting democracy and talking about like electoral competition and then they create this environment. People are tired of authoritarianism and they go and they give democracy a chance. But they give a flawed kind of democracy which is presidentialism a chance which will have all sorts of problems and very very often devolves into authoritarian once more. And this will make people more cynical of democracy in the first place. So I would really think that for the benefit of these NGOs, for these institutions that are promoting democracy in the world, that they would talk about, well, we should really do the one that has worked best in the countries that has been tried.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, exactly cool. Yeah, I totally agree. So to wrap up the discussion I’d like to hear, do you have any books or articles that you would strongly recommend on the topic.

Tiago Santos: Um, so modesty aside, I really think that my book has a very good general overview, I think that it tries to fill a gap. 

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah I can recommend it too for sure.

Tiago Santos: Thank you! I would recommend William Selinger “Parliamentarism, [From Burke to Weber]”, which is a book on the history of thoughts about parliamentarism. And the other one would be “The Failure of Presidential Democracy”, which is compiled by Juan Linz and Valenzuela, and has many articles. Those are the two books if I may, yeah.

Stephan Kyburz: Okay, cool. Thanks a lot for sharing those and I will definitely link to them in the show notes, so people can have a look at them. Cool and also of course to your book.

Stephan Kyburz: Alright, Tiago. Thanks a lot for that discussion. It was very interesting to hear your views and hopefully we can have a follow-up discussion at some later point in time to see how things developed.

Tiago Santos: Well anytime. This was great, this was a very good conversation. I really like to follow you and the podcast is really good. Well thank you.

Stephan Kyburz: Cool. Thanks a lot Tiago, bye bye.

Tiago Santos: Bye.

Outro:

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