Political Scientists Explain Why U.S. Presidentialism Threatens Democracy

This is a lightly edited transcript of the May 13 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or follow the show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: We’re going to have a discussion that’s about democracy, but a little broader than the day-to-day news. And the guests are two political scientists. Lee Drutman is with the New America Foundation, and Mark Copelovitch is at the University of Wisconsin. Lee has done a lot of great work on parties and political reform, and Mark specializes in international political economy. He’s written about Europe and the political parties there, but also does some comparative work comparing what’s happening in the U.S. to what’s happening abroad. So guys, thank you. Welcome.

Mark Copelovitch: Thanks for having us.

Lee Drutman: Yeah. Excited to be having this conversation. Couldn’t be more timely.

Bacon: So I’m going to start with Mark, and I want to talk about—we’re going to define the problem first. And for a lot of New Republic listeners, the problem is the Republican Party—and I think that to some extent as well. But I think we want to get a little bit beyond this. One thing Mark talks about a lot on Bluesky—Mark has a great Bluesky feed, check him out there—is the problem of presidentialism. And explain to people—right now the presidency being a problem seems intuitive if you think about Donald Trump, maybe. But also Britain has a prime minister, and things are not going perfectly there right now either. So explain to me, from a political science perspective, why presidential systems are inherently problematic for democracies.

Why Presidential Systems Undermine Democratic Accountability

Copelovitch: Yes. My thoughts on this come from a classic article from Juan Linz, who was a scholar of Latin American politics and authoritarianism. He wrote an article back in the 1990s called The Perils of Presidentialism. And one of the core ideas of it is that presidential systems make it difficult to hold the executive accountable in ways that parliamentary systems don’t. So you have the separation of powers, and in the U.S. we’re raised as Americans to believe that the branches of government and the separation of powers are good. But one of the things that Linz talked about with presidentialism is it makes it very difficult to remove the chief executive when laws are being broken, crimes are being committed, et cetera. And it creates dual and unresolvable claims to legitimacy.

So if you think about a parliamentary system, you vote—it’s usually proportional representation of some form. The prime minister is within the parliament, and this is what we’re seeing in Britain right now: the main party in government can remove the prime minister. There can be a vote of confidence, which is usually a simple majority vote, where the coalition says, We no longer support the prime minister, and either there are new elections or you choose a new prime minister. It happens very quickly, and as we’ve seen in Britain, it can happen often—and it can happen