arguments for the superiority of parliamentary government. In the end, they showed how an organic constitution, created over centuries in one country, could be grafted onto another country quite different in its religious, linguistic, and social institutions. The Canadian example of a peaceful accession to independence with a Westminster system of government came to be followed by fifty countries with a combined population of more than two billion people, and that is no small thing.
THE CONVERGENCE TOWARD CROWN GOVERNMENT
Within the last twenty years political power has been centralized in the executive branch of government in America, Britain, and Canada, like a virus that attacks different people, with different constitutions, in different countries at the same time. Something other than the different systems of government must have produced the change; and there are three plausible explanations. First, power naturally gravitates from disorganized groups (such as Congress) to a single person (such as the president). The group must struggle to get its act together; not so the single person. Second, the imperatives of the regulatory state require a large bureaucracy that is primarily responsible to the executive; the legislative branch must delegate rule-making authority to regulators whose rules are so varied and extensive that they resist legislative oversight. That leaves the executive branch, which hires the regulators, promotes and demotes them, and generally tells them what to do. Third, political campaigns have been transformed by the media, which makes rock stars of presidents and prime ministers. What all this has produced is something very close to George Mason’s elective monarchy, a form of Crown government more centralized still than the personal government of George III against which the Framers had rebelled.
In chapter 5 I describe the growth of Crown government in the United States and Canada. In Canada, cabinet members now take a back seat to the political advisers in the Prime Minister’s Office, who are responsible solely to the prime minister; and the civil service is centralized around a Privy Council Office, with whose head prime ministers plan their agendas. In the United States power has been centralized in the presidency, even more than in Canada. The separation of powers, which was meant to restrict the president’s authority, has instead served to shield him from congressional oversight. With the moral authority of the only person elected by the country as a whole and a fixed term of office, a president can make laws by regulation and unmake them by refusing to enforce the law, with an independence from Congress that prime ministers could never have from Parliament. The president also has what prime ministers lack, the power to begin or continue a war without regard to the wishes of the legislature.
In the first five chapters, which form Part I of this book, I describe the historical evolution of the constitutions of America, Britain, and Canada, and their recent convergence around a strong executive power. In the five chapters of Part II, I discuss the dangers this might pose, and the manner in which parliamentary regimes are better equipped to preserve peaceful, ordered, and good democratic government.
THE PITFALLS OF PRESIDENTIALISM
Echoing Montesquieu, James Madison thought the separation of powers a necessary bulwark of liberty: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”8 That has not been our historical experience, however, as I show in chapter 6. There are a good many more presidents-for-life than prime-ministers-for-life. For example, nearly every country of the former Soviet Union that adopted a presidential system is now an autocracy. Lithuania apart, only their parliamentary systems remain full democracies. The U.S. Constitution seemingly was not made for export. If it has not led to autocracy, is that because it is American, and not because of the separation of powers?
A democracy may more easily descend into a dictatorship when the head of government is also head of state, as he is in a presidential regime. As heads of government, presidents are the most powerful officials in their countries. As heads of state, they are also their countries’ ceremonial leaders, and command the loyalty and respect of all patriots. Not so in a parliamentary system, which keeps the two functions separate. Prime ministers are not heads of state and do not symbolize the nation. The difference, as I explain in chapter 7, is protective of liberty in parliamentary regimes.
Parliamentary systems also have safety valves that presidential systems lack. Presidents have a fixed term; prime ministers may be turfed out at any time by a majority in the House of Commons. Presidents are largely immunized from parliamentary accountability; prime ministers must face Parliament and respond to questions from the Opposition on a daily basis when Parliament is in session and the prime minister is in the country. In chapter 8 I discuss how these differences help presidents who would become dictators, and also how they bring a different kind of leader to power. A president may be a demagogue, unskilled in debate, impatient and vexed when questioned, cocooned from the public. A successful prime minister is a very different sort of person. He must be thick-skinned, and able to tolerate catcalls in Parliament and on the hustings. He, more than presidents, is assisted by a sense of humor and wit. Delusions of Gaullist grandeur are fatal for prime ministers, but can be an advantage for presidents.
The separation of powers in presidential regimes is thought to serve two purposes. By placing a check on the power of a president, it is said to protect liberty; and by subjecting legislation to the scrutiny of three different branches of government, it screens out bad laws. As I show in chapter 9, however, the deadlocks produced by divided government in a presidential regime may encourage a power-seeking president to disregard the legislature and rule by decree. The claim about better government is similarly suspect. While separationism might prevent bad laws from being enacted, it also impedes the repeal of bad laws. The choice is between ex ante screening, before a law is enacted in a presidential regime, and ex post reversibility thereafter in a parliamentary one, and I argue that the advantage lies with Britain and Canada.
Presidential regimes lend themselves to would-be dictators, and alarmists might perceive a fatal tendency to dictatorial, one-man rule in the United States. There is little reason to expect that to happen in the near future, since the democratic traditions of the United States remain among the strongest in the world. Nevertheless, any predictions about the shape of American politics twenty to forty years hence are speculative, and in the last chapter I examine three ways that strong presidentialism might turn into an even stronger form of executive governance: through the criminalization of political differences, through changes in the Supreme Court, and through demographic changes. I conclude with a brief look at how the balance might be tilted back in the direction of congressional government.
The Framers’ Constitution was an improvement over the contemporary British constitution. However, neither it nor the modern American Constitution is an improvement over the British or Canadian constitutions of today. When compared with presidential government, modern parliamentary systems more strongly hold misbehaving leaders to account before a House of Commons. Since it lacks a separation of powers, parliamentary government also avoids what Woodrow Wilson identified as the inconveniences of divided government. American government “lacks promptness because its authorities are multiplied,” he wrote. It “lacks wieldiness because its processes are roundabout, lacks efficiency because its responsibility is indistinct and its action without competent direction.”9 Parliamentary systems have few of these difficulties, and at the same time better protect political freedom. An American is apt to think that his Constitution uniquely protects liberty. The truth is almost exactly the reverse, and this calls for a reconsideration of the limits of executive
