#USA #Politics #Democracy #Presidentialism: "Political scientist Juan Linz’s 1990 essay “The Perils of Presidentialism” makes the case that governments with separately elected presidents are notoriously unstable. American democracy sidestepped these showdowns for decades, Linz explained, due to ideological flexibility among the parties. Anyone pining for these “good old days,” of course, is pining for the racism that was the principal reason for this temporary condition. Southern segregationists with historical ties to Democrats stuck with the party for much of the 20th century, with liberal Republicans anchored to that party’s radical past. This gave Democrats and Republicans separate liberal and conservative wings, creating pressure for cross-partisan dealmaking.
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America combines its presidential framework with first-past-the-post voting, where election winners take all the power, rather than a proportional system of power-sharing. Political scientists have observed something called Duverger’s law, which says that a first-past-the-post system with a single ballot (rather than a runoff) inevitably favors two parties, while two-ballot or proportional representation systems favor multiple parties. That’s why third-party voters in the U.S. are routinely demonized as spoilers, even “the biggest threat, I think, to democracy,” as Barack Obama campaign manager Jim Messina recently said.
While we see democracies with both presidential and parliamentary systems, and democracies with first-past-the-post and proportional representation, America’s variant is exceedingly rare. Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, looked at 78 relatively stable democracies around the world, and found just four with presidents and majoritarian legislatures: the U.S., Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Our system is not replicated because it’s not effective."
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-01-29-america-is-not-democracy/
