Juan J. Linz initiated the modern critique of the United States political system and its imitators by warning about “the perils of presidentialism” and praising “the virtues of parliamentarism” (especially in his 1990 article for Journal of Democracy and later in his 1994 book, The Failure of Presidential Democracy, with Arturo Valenzuela). My point is that these two institutional systems can be better labeled as separation of powers and fusion of powers or parliamentarism (to follow Walter Bagehot’s nomenclator). “Presidentialism” is not an institution but an anomalous behavior in an institutional system of separation of powers; as it favors the concentration of powers in one of the institutions, it generates institutional conflict with the separate congressional branch.

My book is subtitled “a critical review” of the U.S. political system, while Maxwell Stearns’ book is a proposal for its transformation. He says that my “powerful diagnosis demands as effective a cure.” I agree, and in the last chapter of my book, I suggest three possible lines of behavior that could improve the current system’s performance without major institutional reforms. First, improving voting with procedures already spread at the local and state levels, such as open primaries with a top-two runoff. Second, reinforcing cooperation between the Cabinet and Congress by generalizing the Secretaries’ delivery of periodical accounts of their job to Congress. And third, more overlooked and more important, reconsidering some divisions of powers between the federal government and the states to diminish the confrontation on certain issues that may be more consensually settled at lower institutional levels. The subsidiarity criterion states that whatever a low-level government can do efficiently should not be transferred to a higher level. What the local government can handle should be left to the local government; what the state can handle should be under state jurisdiction; the federal government should have jurisdiction only over those issues that lower-level authorities cannot handle well. An efficient distribution of issues between the different levels of government should lower the stakes of national politics and, thus, reduce the contentiousness of presidential elections and de-escalate political conflicts in Washington.

All in all, my proposals point to “parliamentarizing presidentialism.” Let us change political behavior if the foundations of the institutional system cannot be replaced. The tone may sound like muddling through and kicking the can down the road. This is because I guess that the blockage of the existing political system regarding major legislation is even stronger when it comes to constitutional amendments. But, of course, I salute the debate about more ambitious initiatives for institutional reforms, such as those framed by Maxwell Stearns, which can always serve as a reference for critical comparison.