This is part of my constitutional design series.
This post is about the executive in government. Or, well, kind of. First I’m going to briefly discuss the executive, before shifting to a discussion of why the leader of a country doesn’t necessarily have to be chief executive. I’m then going to dive through the details of the interplay between the executive, the legislature, and the leader. This is maybe the post in this whole series that most challenges the common thinking about these types of topics, so I hope to make a convincing case. Let’s jump in.
What is the Executive?
The executive is the second most integral part of the government. Its actions consist broadly of two buckets:
It enforces the law. This includes:
executing the law, something the legislature physically cannot do. Police officers physically go and take someone from their house and put them in jail
issuing directives to implement statutory rules that lead to this execution, which the legislature’s process of voting on every single thing is ill-equipped to handle. This is why military policy tends to be so executive-dominated - military action is basically just a bunch of directives.
creating some of the procedure and structure to do the above two. This can sometimes (usually harmfully IMO) be explicitly ideology-oriented, like Trump 1’s requirement that for every new regulation created two must be repealed.
It creates rules that the legislature doesn’t have time to deal with. These rules are usually either
minor details not worth the legislature’s time, like the exact chemicals in water to be regulated
fast-changing enough that the legislature can’t keep up with them, like with emergent technology like AI.
The Chief Executive
Why do you need a chief executive?
Well, you don’t. To justify this, let me summarize an earlier longer version of this argument that I decided wasn’t worth your time:.
One reason you might have a chief executive is to allow them to structure the executive however they like. However, the executive is always structured as a group of departments anyway, so if you’re willing to accept that the responsibilities of different departments aren’t shuffled frequently - and in most countries in practice this is true - you don’t need a single person at the top.
Another reason you might choose to have a chief executive is to settle disputes and facilitate collaboration between different agencies. However, this too doesn’t necessitate a single person at the top; you can just have the ministers vote on disagreements, or you can have a separate executive council to decide things like this. It also isn’t strictly necessary - you see plenty of inefficiency and conflict between state governments and the federal government in the US because they aren’t under the same command, but things mostly still work.
What I think people are really looking for in a chief executive is a leader. They want a single person with disproportionate political power whom they can hold accountable for government action and the state of the country. This leader doesn’t necessarily need to be chief executive, they just need to have significant power to shape national policy.
I would really like to see more countries try not having a leader at all. Either have a majoritarian voting system and base your accountability democracy on parties rather than people, or have a proportional voting system and mostly dispense with accountability democracy altogether like the Swiss have. That said, I think there is some logic to having a leader - and an argument that even if you don’t have one, one will pop up, so you might as well make their powers explicit - so I will continue this post with the assumption that there is one.
Presidential vs. Parliamentary Democracy
The core difference between parliamentary and presidential democracy is that in a parliamentary democracy, the leader (called “prime minister”, PM) is chosen by a majority vote of the legislature (called “forming a government”) and can be removed by a majority vote (called a “vote of no confidence” or “dissolving government”), while in a presidential democracy the leader (called “president”) is elected by the public. In just about all modern democracies the leader is the chief executive but I think more fundamentally occupies the accountability role discussed above.
Stability?
People often make the argument that presidential democracy is more “stable” than parliamentary democracy. To understand what that means, first we have to discuss some procedure. In most countries, when a legislature votes to dissolve government, you first see if anyone else can form a government, and if not you go to new elections. If still after new elections nobody can form a new government, you have more elections, forever, until someone can form a new government. Until a new government is formed, the current prime minister usually stays “interim” prime minister, whose powers vary by country but are often all the powers of a full PM.
The instability that people refer to is these times when no one has majority support in the legislature. During these times:
A lot fewer laws are passed
often including no new budgets, which usually means the budget from the previous year is used
You have lots of elections.
But (1) is a result of a proportional electoral system, not of parliamentary democracy. If you really hate these times of no stable majority, you can choose a more majoritarian electoral system.
If you hate (2), you can just not have snap elections, which kind of turns the interim prime minister into a president who does not command a majority in the legislature. I talk more about this choice in this piece.
So I don’t think stability is a real difference between parliamentary and presidential democracy. The real differences are twofold: who chooses the leader, and what power the legislature has to remove them.
Choosing the Leader
In a presidential democracy, it is the public that chooses how to coalesce around a single person. In parliamentary democracy, it is the legislature.
This means that sometimes an elected president is not from the coalition that the prime minister would be selected from. If the country is 40% left-wing party / 15% centrist party / 45% right-wing party and the legislature is elected proportionally, parliamentary democracy might be more likely to see a center-right coalition because of a norm that the largest party gets the PM spot. Presidential democracy might happen to get a center-left president though just because most centrist voters preferred the center-left candidate to his right wing opponent.
This might not be too bad, arguably even desirable. What I think is bad is when a legislature is 55% left wing and you get a right wing president: the whole point of a leader is to have power so voters can hold them accountable, what good is a leader that can’t get anything done? They end up being blamed for things they can’t control and can’t do things that might make them more popular. This situation is rare1 but does happen, and it is one of main reasons I dislike presidential democracy.
(You can try to avoid this by just giving the elected president some votes in the legislature. More on this option in a bit.)
Other times, although an elected president comes from the coalition that would form under parliamentary democracy, the president could be just a different person than a prime minister would be. Depending on the electoral system you have in presidential democracy, and depending on the PM-selection dynamics you have in parliamentary democracy, you could select for moderates in one system and extremists in the other. I think in general you’re more likely to get a moderate under parliamentary democracy, but not necessarily.
Who you trust more to coalesce around a leader really depends on your preferences. You might trust elites to more rationally follow their political views, or think that they can better assess a leader’s competence. Alternatively, you might trust the public to more faithfully execute their true political preferences.
Removal
The second difference between parliamentary democracy and presidential democracy is that in parliamentary democracy, politicians can vote out the leader midway through the term, either calling a snap election or replacing them with someone else. One worry you might have is that a party campaigns with a popular leader and immediately dumps them following an election victory, but this basically never happens in practice so I don’t think it’s a big concern.
This power is used in two main ways. The first is as a threat, forcing the leader to adhere to the legislature’s views. In a coalition government between multiple parties, it is very common for there to be intense negotiation before a government is formed. These governments will usually have different members of the coalition hold different minister spots as a compromise. In these cases, the leader wields much less power than what you’d expect solely by judging their powers, because one misstep can mean the end of the coalition.
The other main way the removal power is used is for containing personal interest, something I think is extremely valuable. In a parliamentary democracy, if it is revealed that the chief executive is massively corrupt, but a majority of the legislature is not, the legislature can replace the leader with someone of the same party. In a presidential democracy, you are usually stuck with a corrupt leader. Similar logic applies to a situation where the president moves to become dictator while a majority of the legislature feels more strongly about democracy - they can just vote him out.
Corruption sometimes cuts the other way. If a majority of the legislature is corrupt, they will likely choose a corrupt leader, while in presidential democracy you might get an anti-corruption president taking on the legislature. Note, however, the way the incentives point. In a parliamentary democracy, a corrupt party in the legislature is still incentivized to pick an anti-corruption leader, or boot out their leader when they have a corruption scandal, as public opinion revolves around the leader. In a presidential democracy, while corrupt leaders are initially selected against, the inability to easily remove them means a party in legislature usually has to stand by a corrupt president.
Removal is not necessarily exclusive to parliamentary democracy; you can have impeachment power in presidential democracy. You can make it the norm that this power is only used in cases of corruption and antidemocratic behavior, or you can let it be used for any political disagreements. The normal way this is done is with a 2/3 supermajority, which makes it less likely to happen than in parliamentary democracy. Technically though you don’t need this supermajority - you can let the legislature vote out the president with a majority. (Maybe you can mandate a snap election every time this happens to ensure it doesn’t always happen immediately following an election.) This is an interesting hybrid between presidential and parliamentary democracy. I worry that removal might happen all the time anyway in this system, but if you have strong enough norms it might not, so maybe it’s worth considering.
You can even make it the law that impeachment can only occur because of corruption or antidemocratic behavior. You can have this be an unenforced law like in the US, or you can make it so the judiciary has to approve any impeachments. Whether enforcement is a good idea depends on how much you trust the judiciary. If you really trust the judiciary, you can make it so the legislature is not even necessary to remove the leader, the judiciary can do it on their own if they find that the leader breaks the law. The issue is that you need someone to codify what qualifies as an impeachable offense, which is likely to give a lot of leeway either to the judiciary (making it hard for them to be objective) or to the legislature (allowing them to change the law to shield one of their preferred leaders from impeachment).
I prefer parliamentary democracy, especially on the national level, but I don’t think presidential democracy is totally insane. I’m going to consider both parliamentary and presidential democracy for the rest of the series.
Now, onto the question of which powers you should give the leader.
Powers For A Leader
On the one hand, if you buy the accountability argument, you want to give the leader enough power to shape government policy substantially. On the other hand, you don’t want to give them too much power, due to the advantages of legislatures I laid out in my post on the legislature and to avoid this person becoming a dictator.
I think the most coherent vision is to give the leader power to shape the “agenda”. What does agenda mean? I think it’s based on the idea that government entities have only a finite amount of “policymaking energy”, which is probably mostly time, and the agenda is where the most energy is spent. The agenda is the changes that are highest priority, especially those which require substantial effort (rather than those which are more flip-of-a-switch). Big new investments in infrastructure requiring planning and negotiation may be on the president’s agenda, while banning abortion is a much quicker task and thus doesn’t fit as well with the agenda concept. The legislative majority gets to decide which changes to the status quo are possible, but the power to shape agenda means the leader gets to set the priorities.
I think this agenda-setting power fits well with the way campaigns are normally run - the candidates promise to tackle something when they get into office, and then spend much of their term working out the details.
How do you make sure the leader sets the agenda? Let’s go over my preferred powers.
Legislative Powers
There are two main ways of giving the leader legislative powers: veto power over all laws passed by the legislature, or some number of votes in the legislature.
I think you should allow the legislature to override the veto of the leader with a supermajority, to limit their power somewhat. A good number might be 60% - if a coalition has a bare majority, it takes 1/5 of legislators from the majority coalition to break off to get a bill through. Overridable veto power and raw votes are fairly similar, with the difference being that a leader with votes can use them to pass things, not just block them. I think giving the leader raw votes just gives them way too much power to push through things that are unpopular. I do actually like this system on the local level, but not nationally.
I prefer veto power on the national level. I would actually go further than veto power over final laws and give the leader veto power at every stage in the legislature, on the introduction of a bill and on every amendment. This could be implemented via “leader’s representatives”, people appointed by the leader to vote on his behalf, and who the leader can replace at will. More on this in my post on legislative procedure.
I would consider setting out categories of law not subject to the leader’s veto. These might be areas of lower salience or areas you don’t think play well into accountability democracy. This has the drawback of needing some authority to classify which laws are and are not subject to the veto, but this might be worth it.
Executive Powers
I think some executive power goes well with this image of a leader as well. The idea is that if the leader wants to make a big push in a certain area, the leader should have control over the intricacies how this is actually accomplished. If the leader had no executive power and those that did were to disagree with the leader’s agenda, they would have the opportunity to just not try very hard to implement it.
I would make it so the leader appoints ministers. You can require approval of a majority of the legislature to fire or appoint ministers. If you add these mechanisms, I would add them together. If the leader has the power to fire but not appoint ministers, you have to have some interim minister to fill the spot in the meantime, which will probably be appointed by the leader. Then you have the problem of the leader keeping the interim minister there forever - you can try to specify limits on the changes that interim leaders can implement in statutory law, but this is hard to do and requires formalizing a lot of executive procedure within statutory law.
Minister Approval
One last choice to make is whether majority legislature approval is required for replacing ministers.2
This is not really relevant in normally functioning parliamentary democracy. Minister appointments from different parties in a coalition are often a precondition for them entering into the agreement, and it’s common to see governments fall apart when the leader replaces one of the ministers. These mechanisms are however relevant in presidential democracy or in parliamentary democracy with an interim leader (ie, one lacking a majority).
This mechanism makes the executive not a unified body - the leader may disagree with the actions of one of their ministers but have no recourse. Importantly, it mean the leader can’t order the ministers to do things. I’m pretty in favor of these mechanisms because of the advantages of the legislature, especially in containing personal interest. I think it’s quite bad when the leader gets to appoint their corrupt cronies or dictatorship-enablers no matter what. I don’t think having a unified executive is of much importance, the unification of the government should come from having to obey the law. The bare minimum, in my mind, is that the leader is allowed to replace ministers as part of the big policy pushes that make up their agenda - the legislature passes a big climate bill that the leader pushes for, and as part of it the climate minister is replaced to someone who will loyally execute it. Everything else is unnecessary and potentially harmful.
(The one place I am very opposed to requiring legislative approval is for firing military officials, and in fact I might make it the law that military officers have to obey orders. The leader should be commander-in-chief3.)
That rounds out all I have to say about the leader and the executive. Hopefully you have a better conception about the leader in a government and what types of powers and structure they should have.
Except in systems with midterms like the US
You could separate appointments and firings here, making appointments need confirmation while firings don’t, like they do in the US. The trouble is figuring out what to do in the meantime between a minister’s firing and the next minister being hired. Usually there is a interim minister, but then what’s stopping the leader from keeping the interim minister there forever. You could have some powers that only a full minister could execute and not a temporary minister, but this is tough to define.
I am open to the idea that the leader should only be commander-in-chief during wartime in order to give more force to declarations of war, with some minister being commander-in-chief during peacetime. I’m not sure how that would work in practice though. If the US is in war in Iraq, does the other minister still get to be commander-in-chief for non-Iraq-war-related activities? If so how does that work, if not then it seems like you’re very liable to the leader being commander-in-chief all the time anyway.