Afghan President Hamid Karzai (wikimedia)

My read of the literature is that strong presidential systems, such as we have in the United States, are moderately ill-advised. The tendency in such systems is for the President and the legislature to every now-and-again find themselves in an intractable disagreement—the scenario knows as “gridlock” in American politics—that doesn’t admit of any clear mechanism for resolution. This often leads to either the President mounting a coup (as used to happen a lot in Latin America) or else to Congress mounting a somewhat specious impeachment drive (as happened in the US during the Johnson administration and has tended to happen more recently in Latin America) in an effort to convert the regime to something more like a de facto parliamentary system.

Be all that as it may, strong presidential systems are also pretty rare outside of the Western Hemisphere where the US influence was very strong during the days of independence. In the twentieth century when the United States was helping countries (Germany, Japan, Austria) under military occupation or emerging from Communist rule (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary) write constitutions even we didn’t advise them to adopt our system. Which led me to wonder how Afghanistan wound up with a strong president. My colleague Colin Cookman was kind enough to send me a not-online article by Barnett Rubin which explains:

The issue of governmental systems came into sharp relief at the CLJ as calls rang out for an up-or-down vote on presidentialism versus parliamentarism. Nearly all Pushtun delegates, joined by some members from other ethnic groups, came out for presidentialism. A bloc of non-Pushtun delegates, however, strongly supported a parliamentary system. Both sides made cases that mixed genuine public considerations with ethnopolitical ambitions. For Pushtuns and reformers, presidentialism provided a way for one of their own—everyone knew that the first incumbent would be Karzai—to emerge from the Bonn compromise with non-Pushtun armed factions as the popularly elected head of state. There would be no uncertainty about who held legitimate executive power in Kabul, and Washington would retain the benefit of having a clearly identifiable Afghan partner whom it would know well and indeed preferred. The largely non-Pushtun delegates who opposed presidentialism saw in it a risk of personal and ethnic dictatorship. A parliamentary system, they argued, would likely result in coalition governments that would be more representative and inclusive, safer from potential abuses of executive power, and hence more stable.

This seems like a really bad reason to favor a presidential system. The plurality ethnic group sees it as a way to entrench their power and, besides, everyone has a particular president in mind who they like. And Rubin’s account of the presidentialists’ more policy oriented case is also unpersuasive to me, “In his speech to the CLJ’s closing session, President Karzai cited post-1945 Italy and India since the Congress Party’s decline as negative examples.”

India seems like the relevant example, where a high level of diversity plus parliamentarism makes it difficult to assemble a stable coalition. Parliamentary government would have a similar problem in Afghanistan. But at the same time, shifting to presidentialism doesn’t actually make the underlying diversity and other social cleavages go away. Instead, it tends to ensure that presidential elections will become zero-sum contests of power between a Pashto candidate and a Tajik candidate in which both sides need to court the support of an Uzbek mass murderer and then deal with the inevitable ensuing legitimacy problems by informally assembling a coalition anyway.

A few days backed I linked to a short take from Sasha Polakow-Suransky about the failures of opposition politics in South Africa. He has a longer take in The National that, I think, puts this in an enlightening perspective:

COPE, despite the hopes it inspired, fell flat – taking just under eight per cent of the vote, while the DA took almost 17 per cent and won control of the Western Cape. The fact remains that South Africa has not yet emerged from the era of national liberation politics. The Congress Party, which led the anti-colonial struggle in India, was not seriously challenged nationally for the first 20 years of independence and it did not lose control of the parliament until 1977. It was in the same year, three decades after the establishment of Israel, that voters there shocked the nation’s founding elite by electing the Likud opposition for the first time.

South Africa has not yet reached the stage where, as Johnny Copelyn puts it, “the previous order is so far in the background that it is no l­onger a compelling explanation for the problems people have”.

That said, there are also a bunch of countries that never emerged from the phase of initial domination by the liberation political party. Thus far, though, despite much hand-wringing related to Jacob Zuma I haven’t seen any real indication that democratic institutions don’t continue to exist in South Africa. The ANC just continues to have an extremely strong grip on the public imagination.

Rick Hertzberg blogs a point that Adam Blickstein made to me in person yesterday: While there’s nothing unusual about Israel’s use of party list proportional representation, there is something unusual about the use of a very low threshold—just two percent—to get into the Knesset. It would be more common to have something like five percent.

That’s a fair point, and something the Israelis might want to change.

Bernard Lewis, writing in The Wall Street Journal becomes about the millionth American friend of Israel to assert that Israel’s election system is the source of its problems. The people making this argument tend to know exactly four things about electoral systems:

• Israel uses party-list proportional representation.
• So did the Weimar Republic!
• Israel’s politics is messed-up.
• In America we use a different system!
• Q.E.D.

Really. This is the argument:

This system of voting by lists is the source of many of the difficulties which plague Israeli public life. In the English-speaking countries — the oldest and most stable democracies — voting is by constituencies. The founders of the state of Israel preferred the Weimar model — hardly an auspicious choice.

The system used in Israel is D’Hondt Method Party-List Proportional Representation and it’s not some idiosyncratic Weimar-and-Israel thing, it’s in use in many medium-sized democracies and most of the small ones. In alphabetical order they use it in Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, East Timor, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, The Netherlands, Paraguay, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Scotland, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, Venezuela and Wales. The similar Sainte-Laguë Method of list PR is used in New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Latvia, Kosovo, and is partially used in Germany.

Nobody ever writes op-eds in the United States about how list-PR is killing Denmark or Portugal or how local government will never work in Scotland until it’s abandoned. This is simply the system that’s usually used in small countries. And Israel is a small country. So they use the appropriate system.

With regard to the Weimar Republic note that in 1932 a majority of Germans voted for either the Nazis or the Communist Party. Given that underlying distribution of opinion, how was a different electoral system going to change things?

Jeffrey Goldberg is among those who think Israel’s problems can be lain at the feet of its proportional representation system:

The Arab world doesn’t have enough democracy; Israel has too much. Israel’s is an insane system, which gives every lunatic fringe party disproportionate say in the running of the country, and therefore encourages radicalism. Lieberman is incorrigible, but if he had to exist within the framework of a center-right party, he’d be marginally less offensive.

First, it needs to be said that Israel’s system, whether you like it or not, is hardly an “insane” outlier. Most small democracies use very similar systems and Israel is a small democracy.

Second, as regard Lieberman I think this is totally wrong. If he had to exist within the framework of a center-right party in an American-style system, he and his followers would be the “base” of his party. He wouldn’t be a viable national leader, but he could still, à la Mike Pence, be an influential force. But more to the point, the larger center-right party would be anchored to the base’s views. Under the current Israeli system, there’s no procedural rule forcing Netanyahu to govern in coalition with Lieberman. The current electoral results are consistent with a center-right coalition grounded in a Likud-Kadima partnership. By contrast, in the U.S. system only coalitions that start at the extreme and work inwards are viable on anything other than a spot basis. And one consequence of this is that centrist dealmaking tends, à la Nelson-Collins, to devolve into inane horse-trading rather than a genuine effort to develop a synthesis of ideas.

In response to a very good question for ABC News’ Terry Moran, President Barack Obama specifically addressed why he’s rejected a “Swedish” approach to the financial crisis:

There are two countries who have gone through some big financial crises over the last decade or two. One was Japan, which never really acknowledged the scale and magnitude of the problems in their banking system and that resulted in what’s called “The Lost Decade.” They kept on trying to paper over the problems. The markets sort of stayed up because the Japanese government kept on pumping money in. But, eventually, nothing happened and they didn’t see any growth whatsoever.

Sweden, on the other hand, had a problem like this. They took over the banks, nationalized them, got rid of the bad assets, resold the banks and, a couple years later, they were going again. So you’d think looking at it, Sweden looks like a good model. Here’s the problem; Sweden had like five banks. [LAUGHS] We’ve got thousands of banks. You know, the scale of the U.S. economy and the capital markets are so vast and the problems in terms of managing and overseeing anything of that scale, I think, would — our assessment was that it wouldn’t make sense. And we also have different traditions in this country.

Obviously, Sweden has a different set of cultures in terms of how the government relates to markets and America’s different. And we want to retain a strong sense of that private capital fulfilling the core — core investment needs of this country.

And so, what we’ve tried to do is to apply some of the tough love that’s going to be necessary, but do it in a way that’s also recognizing we’ve got big private capital markets and ultimately that’s going to be the key to getting credit flowing again.

Obama makes two arguments here, one about scale and one about national tradition. I think the argument about tradition is clearly true—this is a big barrier to a Swedish-style solution. But I don’t think it’s a valid objection for the President to offer. What he’s describing is precisely the situation I fear; a situation in which public officials are refusing to do what needs to be done out of what amounts to ideological rigidity. This is the United States of America, so we can’t have widespread nationalization even if we should. The argument about scale is different. You could see it being the case that what works in a small open economy wouldn’t work in a large somewhat open one. There are, in fact, lots of situations like that. The sort of unilateral fiscal stimulus we’re attempting isn’t really appropriate to small open economies. So I could be convinced that this is correct. On the other hand, it’s not clear to me what about the Obama/Geithner alternative to nationalization actually meets this problem. It’s inherently more difficult to conduct oversight and administration in the United States, which really could make it harder to make nationalization work. But the Obama/Geithner alternative will also work poorly unless oversight and administration can be made to work. This amounts to saying “just because nationalization worked in Sweden doesn’t mean it’ll necessarily work here, so I’ll try something else that also might not won’t work.” The reasoning doesn’t go through without the first consideration—we’re not nationalizing the banks because, damnit, we don’t do that sort of thing in the United States. To which I say that nationalizing the banks’ losses doesn’t exactly fit in with American cultural ideas about rugged individualism either.

See also Paul Kedrosky (who I largely agree with but I wouldn’t quite get so irate), Felix Salmon (who’s grateful that unlike Geithner, Bush, or Paulson Obama can at least explain himself in a cogent way), Paul Krugman (who says nationalization is more American than Obama thinks, but who has no credibility since he’s on the Swedish payroll) and Tyler Cowen (who I think agrees with Obama).

My bottom line: Visit the Nordic countries and you’ll be impressed that their civilian public agencies are much more effective than ours. Arguments which observe that things their institutions can do, our institutions might well screw up are valid. At the same time, there are things that require effective public agencies to do that need to be done. In fields like educating poor children, we’re simply not doing them, and a price is paid. But it’s a price that most middle class Americans don’t see or pay personally. If it turns out that we can’t manage a financial panic adequately, we’ll all be paying the price. I don’t think assuming failure in advance and therefore adopting unlikely-to-work policies makes sense. Abraham Lincoln and FDR both asked the government to do things it didn’t have the ability to do; that meant they had to build the institutions.

I read some folks in comments yesterday suggesting that somehow the outcome of the Israeli elections debunks my preference for parliamentary systems. Indeed, I recently heard Hubert Védrine, the former Foreign Minister of France, suggest that the whole key to the problem lay in the Israeli electoral system.

One needs to respond to that on several levels.

First, nothing about the idea of a parliamentary system compels you to embrace the idea of proportional representation via party lists or Israel’s very low cut-off threshold for inclusion in parliament. I would say that party list PR is only appropriate for a small country and certainly not something you’d want to try in the United States, which would be better-suited for something like multiple-member constituencies (as in Ireland) or the current first-past-the-post system. But Israel is a small country and I think this is a perfectly appropriate system for them. If I were to offer a purely procedural criticism it would be that the Knesset has too many members. The Netherlands has a similar electoral system, but its parliament features 150 seats for 16 million people. Israel only has 7 million people and 120 MKs.

That said, it’s just not the case that Israeli security policy is being paralyzed by tiny extremist parties. On the contrary, Israel has normally been governed by coalitions dominated by a large centrist party—first Labor then Kadima—which is precisely the virtue of these kind of electoral systems. Unfortunately, underlying Israeli public opinion has shifted sharply to the right over the past ten years. Likud used to be the main rightwing party. Then, under the government of Ariel Sharon in fragmented into a more pragmatic Kadima faction and a hardline-nationalist faction led by Bibi Netanyahu. Now, Israeli opinion has shifted so far to the right that Kadima, which was founded as a center-right party just a few years ago is now left of the public opinion’s center. And the far-right Yisrael Beitanu party is bigger than center-left Labor and dramatically bigger than left-wing Meretz. Meanwhile, Labor has itself shifted right. A politics dominated, on both sides, by nationalists—ranging from pragmatic nationalists to not-so-pragmatic nationalists to frothing-at-the-mouth-racist nationalists—is not so promising for the cause of peace. But that’s because of public opinion not electoral systems.

Prime Minister Geir Haarde resigns due to the collapse of his coalition following the breakdown of the Icelandic economy. I’m a little confused as to why the early elections have been called for May 9. It seems that given the nature of the situation, Icelanders could use early elections to happen really early — like sometime in mid-to-late February. The ability to call early elections when incumbents have been discredited is one of the strengths of these kind of systems of government, but you may as well use the power to actually avoid America-style “months of drifting aimlessly.” But the election date was set a couple of days ago, so maybe as a result of the decision to resign it can be moved up even further. I’ll admit that I’m not entirely familiar with Icelandic constitutional procedures.

James Kirchick mounts a semi-defense of Israel’s move to ban the party’s two Arab political parties. He notes, among other things, that Israel has banned parties in the past including most recently Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Kach Party that was running on basically an ethnic cleansing platform:

The standards for operating a legal political party in Israel are hardly unreasonable. The four offenses that could lead to possible banning are:

* Any rejection (in the party’s goals or activities) of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish, democratic state.
* Any incitement to racism.
* Any support of the armed struggle of an enemy state or terrorist organization against the State of Israel
* Any hint of a cover for illegal activity.

The case for banning these two Arab parties may not be as strong as it was for the outlawing of the Kahane movement, but this decision did not just come out of nowhere. In the United States, if the Ku Klux Klan were to form a political party, advocating the dissolution of the American government and inciting violence from within and without, it would be banned, and rightly so.

I think this conflates some different issues. Obviously the United States would ban organizations that are dedicated to the incitement of violence or that are part of a conspiracy to effect the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. We would not, it seems to me, ban organizations merely for advocating or inciting racism. But America is an outlier in terms of its strong stand in favor of free speech in this regard. I think we’re right and the European and Israeli approach is wrong, but the Israeli approach is hardly outside the bounds of institutional set-ups that count as democratic. Rejecting the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish state seems like a different matter to me. Israel is one of a number of democracies that combines religious tolerance with an established state religion (pretty much all of Protestant Europe, e.g.) and also one of a number of democracies that relies heavily on ethnic origin as a criteria for immigration (Germany, Finland, etc.) both of which are important parts of Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. If you ask me, that’s fine. But by the same token, it’s hardly beyond the pale for a political party to think that those kind of policies should be changed and if that means calling into question Israel’s existence as a specifically “Jewish state,” as opposed to a state where lots of Jews live, I don’t really see why that should be illegal.

More broadly, though, I agree with Kirchick that the pragmatics of this are hard to understand. Israeli Arab public opinion isn’t a small, violent conspiracy that you can ban and extinguish. It’s a real issue that Israel needs to grapple with.

Garrett Epps has a very interesting article in The Atlantic making the case that the presidency is simply a poorly designed office as currently conceived. I really recommend that you read the piece. It’s main flaw, I think, is that it partakes in the brand of solipsism that’s all-too-common in the American media. When the Founding Fathers put the constitution together, they made their best effort at canvassing the historical experience of republican governments in finding models and cautionary tales about what to do. But they didn’t have all that many examples to consider. These days, we can do better. There are lots of republics and constitutional monarchies to survey. And my view is that surveying them reveals that pure parliamentary systems (UK, Netherlands, Germany) with an essentially symbolic head of state are superior to presidential (US, Mexico) or semi-presidential (France, Russia, Afghanistan) ones.

Needless to say, though, that’s not very practical. Epps offers, instead, some incremental proposals for reform. One—the biggest no-brainer of the bunch—is to change the electoral system. Another provocative thought is that we ought to formally divide the execute. An odd feature of the US political regime is that at the level of state government we (except for New Jersey) tend to divide executive authority among multiple independently elected officials even though it’s not especially plausible that the governor of North Dakota is going to seize dictatorial authority. But when it comes to the federal government, where abuse of power is a very real fear, we have only one elected officer. Epps suggests establishing the Attorney-General as an independent figure, elected to four-year terms during the off-cycle years—2010, 2014, 2018, etc. Since this resembles the way most states (and, indeed, many counties) work it might go down smoother as a proposal than would a shift to a Euro-style parliamentarism.

Not, of course, that I have any real hope that any of this will be done. The American public and political class are both strangely complacent about institutional issues. There’s a tendency to become really unhappy about political outcomes and processes, but to give almost no thought to the idea that changing the rules that govern our institutions might be a potent way to relieve this unhappiness. Instead, we believe that a change of personnel will eliminate our unease—that George W. Bush will “change the tone” or Barack Obama will restore hope. Obviously, it really does matter a great deal who occupies our public offices. But on another level, if you want to change things you do need to look at the system in which people are operating.