Parliamentary America is a highly relevant, timely book about the flaws of the United States political system with a proposal for its transformation. The author, a law professor, makes good use of political economy, social choice theory, and comparative politics to make his case. It certainly is not an “academic” exercise in the bad sense of the word, but it is in the best one. The presentation is didactical, with a practical purpose; for the author, his book is not a “mere thought experiment,” but “deeply personal and existential” (p. 241).
I particularly appreciate the diagnosis of the long-term origins of the United States’ current institutional and political crisis. Contrary to a broadly shared opinion, Maxwell Stearns holds that the U.S. Constitution does not deserve credit because it has “long outlasted other constitutions through the world” (p. 28). A better explanation of its endurance can be found in the country’s geopolitical isolation, which avoided military threats and foreign wars on its territory, the long-term experience of slavery, the steady and constant influx of immigrants. “To the extent that the story of our nation is exceptional, it’s in spite of, not because of, our constitutional design”, he states (pp. 2-3). In fact, the basic tenets of the U.S. constitutional system—the separation of powers between the legislative and the executive branches alongside congressional elections in single-member districts by plurality rule—have not been replicated anywhere else across the globe.
Stearns’ analysis and his reform proposals fall along two axes: the electoral rules for the House of Representatives and the relations between Congress and the president, the latter presented as the structure of “presidential accountability.” After a summary review of a few major European systems and some variants elsewhere, Stearns basically embraces the model of Germany, a parliamentary multiparty system.
In my view, the main deficit of the analysis is its neglect of federalism, which is critical for describing both Germany’s excellent governance and for explaining the survival of the United States’ inefficient constitutional design. We should not take the United States as one more nation-state analogous to the largest countries of Europe. It is a much larger and more diverse federation, a “Union” of preexisting separate states that still now keep vigorous powers and create an asymmetric balance with the federal institutions.
Let us start with the House of Representatives. Stearns’ proposal is to double its size and replace its electoral system with one of mixed-member proportional representation by which some representatives would keep being elected in single-member districts and others would be elected in larger districts with multiple seats.
As the author notes, political scientists like Rein Taagepera have shown that the average size of democratic assemblies better fits the cube root of the country’s population. In 1911, when the U.S. House size was fixed at 435 seats, it was an almost exact fit with the nation’s cube root. However, it has remained frozen over the last century, despite the population’s further increase.
Doubling the number of seats of the U.S. House to 870, however, would make it the largest democratic lower chamber in the world, larger than the one in more populous India and than the European Parliament. A major unfortunate consequence would be the infliction of higher costs of organization and decision-making among representatives who would have to multiply their efforts in collecting information, coordinating issues and committees, and negotiating agreements.
It may not be merely chance that the House froze its membership at almost exactly the same time as the United States completed its institutionalization of the forty-eight territorially contiguous states. In the complex political structure of the federal United States, the broad decentralization into a high number of states has compensated for the federal House’s small size and its restrictive political consequences. The very high number of states somehow offsets the limitations of the small federal representation. The effect is extreme in this country, which, with 50 states, is the most decentralized in the world.
A logical inference is that an increase in the size of the House would make it more inclusive, with more diverse partisan affiliations, which would push for a stronger federal government. Some issues that are now mainly debated and decided by the state legislatures would be channeled to Congress as territorial demands by the additional representatives in Washington. In a long-durable democracy, the trade-off between the size of the assembly and territorial decentralization must keep a consistently bounded relationship. It may not be possible to significantly alter an institution without affecting the balance of the other.
According to the “cube root” law, now the House should have around 700 seats. The proposal of “doubling” the current size seems to be motivated by Stearns’ will to keep the current 435 single-member districts and to add the same number in multi-member districts with proportional representation. However, the current single-member districts could also be kept if as many as 265 seats by proportional representation were added to fit the 700-seat more manageable size.
To prevent an excessive number of parties from obtaining representation in the federal House on the basis of peculiar local supports, a national threshold of 5% of the votes would be required (also like in Germany). However, research has shown that in a large and diverse country, the threshold does not have a great influence on the number of political parties that can enter the assembly, which mostly depends on the size of the assembly and the average number of seats in the districts (called “district magnitude”).
Taagepera has also provided a formula to estimate this result in his 2007 book, Predicting Party Sizes (Oxford). In my calculations with that formula, a House with 870 seats and an average district magnitude of 435/50 = 8.7 seats (as the allocation of the number of seats to the parties would only depend on the proportional segment) would tend to produce 9.3 parliamentary parties (about half of them very small). With 700 seats, the average magnitude would be 5.3 and the subsequent number of parties, 7.8 (also about half very small). In short, in both cases, we could roughly expect about four major parties with a few minor ones around. Increasing the size of the assembly by a smaller amount than Stearns proposes might make only a relatively small difference in the number of parties, but it could involve significantly lower organizational and decision-making costs.
Stearns also proposes a procedure to choose the executive president and vice president by the House of Representatives, which is the essence of a parliamentary regime as heralded by the book title. Namely, he would expect either a selection driven by a majority coalition negotiated among party leaders, or an executive with minority legislative support led by the largest party. In both cases, Stearns forecasts a “consensus government” based on “a possible grand coalition that included the now-smaller Republican and Democratic parties” (p. 281).
A motion of “no-confidence” could remove the president and vice president for “mal-administration” (not needing criminal acts like the current impeachment) if supported by 60% of the representatives. Then, he suggests keeping the monarch-ish “line of succession” currently established, instead of the “constructive” censure that leads to investing the leader of the opposition and winner of the censure, as is the case in Germany and other parliamentary countries. As the president and vice president would keep being elected every four years, and the House every two years, this might increase instability, but the peril is tamed by the innovative requirement that an alternative majority replacing the incumbent should include at least one party member from the overthrown coalition.
An inescapable discussion is whether and how these reforms, formally presented as three Constitutional Amendments, could be approved by either two-thirds of the existing Congress or by a Convention called by two-thirds of the states. As the author acknowledges, “the bar is extraordinarily high” (p. 242). He realistically considers that winning support for these reforms among current politicians and public officers will be more important than raising their appeal among citizens. Nevertheless, the author’s list of incentives for supporting the reforms partly relies upon the fact that they might serve as a “pressure release valve” for too busy and overwhelmed incumbent politicians, while he expects they would “empower aspiring leaders” without a decision power in the process (pp. 244, 246).
Stearns hopes these parliamentary-style reforms would make the United States emerge from the current crisis as “a beacon to other nations” with a “genuine, thriving democracy” (p. 241). Yet he mentions more than once that in the United States we live with “the present past”. I would like to evoke the historical analysis of Nobel laureate Douglass North, who remarked how once inefficient institutions exist, they can reinforce themselves and make their replacement difficult. Restrictive institutions can survive as a consequence of actors’ learning by use, their adaptation to institutional regularities, and the costs of their replacement, as he summarized in his 1990 book, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge).
Notwithstanding, in the current degraded political environment, Stearns’ ambitious and optimistic proposal for a parliamentary America is pleasantly refreshing and should be a welcome addition to an urgent debate.
