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> The US government has much stronger checks and balances than most parliamentary systems where the prime minister is elected by the parliament. This means that
by mason55 3y ago
> The US government has much stronger checks and balances than most parliamentary systems where the prime minister is elected by the parliament. This means that there's no split possible between the executive and legislative branch. I think the result of this in the US is that the government tends to deadlock, and has a lot of difficulty compromising, which leads to dissatisfaction and instability. Conflicts heighten without compromise or resolution for decades until they reach a breaking point. In a parliamentary system, the need to build a governing coalition can result in greater incentives to compromise.
Yeah, if I understand, the original idea of the checks & balances in the US was that each branch of government would be fighting to become the most powerful and so they all had ways to stop each other. But it wasn't really designed to deal with the idea that political parties would grow in power enough to supersede the branches of government as the top-level entities fighting for power.
This idea that you'd be able to form a large enough coalition across Congress, the Supreme Court and the Presidency that you could get all three branches to work together wasn't really considered back then. With more localized politics that was basically impossible and so the individual branches were fighting for power.
Our form of government should be updated to reflect the reality of more powerful political parties.
- janalsncm 3y agoPrecisely. There’s effectively no forcing mechanism which guarantees any factions work with each other. So I see Washington’s farewell address warning against factions less as a drop of quaint wisdom but more of a last ditch attempt to rectify a gaping hole in the constitution they had just written. And keep in mind that the current constitution took effect in 1789, only 8 years after the Articles of Confederation went into effect. So there was far less of a feeling that the fundamentals of the Constitution we have now would last forever.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoThe flaw is actually in the use of first past the post voting, which causes more powerful political parties, because the math induces a two party system. Use score voting or approval voting and you'll have more parties that each have less power.