> If you redefine “monarchy” to refer to concentration of power and not the proprietary, hereditary, personal character of paramount leadership, strong Presiden

> If you redefine “monarchy” to refer to concentration of power and not the proprietary, hereditary, personal character of paramount leadership, strong Presidential systems are more “monarchical” within their scope of power than most parliamentary systems. Historically, elective monarchies have been a real thing. The Holy Roman Empire is the most famous example, even though for a significant period of its history it became de facto hereditary. Several Roman Emperors chose their own successors from non-relatives, and retained the hereditary fiction by legally adopting them. In Saudi Arabia, there has never been formal rules about who will be the successor to the throne – instead, each King chooses his own successor. King Salman has broken with the tradition of passing the Kingship among the sons of King Saud (albeit discretionally, since some sons were skipped due to being politically out of favour, or too elderly by the time it was their turn), by appointing as his successor his sixth son. If a King of Saudi Arabia wanted to appoint someone completely unrelated to him as his successor, he could, assuming his family let him get away with it. > OTOH, the US federal government has a narrow scope of authority than most national governments, which makes the overall concentration of power less even though the concentration of that power actually held by the feds is greater. That's nothing to do with the parliamentary versus presidential issue, that's due to the US being a federation – so are federal parliamentary republics such as Germany and Switzerland, and federal parliamentary constitutional monarchies such as Australia and Canada. Presidential-versus-parliamentary and unitary-vs-federal are orthogonal dimensions and neither has much to do with the other.