Why do Americans hate parliamentary systems?
America has a long history of rejecting indirect elections.
Political scientists divide democracies into two major types of systems: Parliamentary systems, where the person in charge of government (usually a prime minister) is indirectly elected by the members of the national legislature; and presidential systems, where the person in charge of government is elected independently of the national legislature.
In most cases, this is a direct election by the people; in the case of the United States, presidential elections are technically indirect. It’s widely understood, however, that the evolved version of the Electoral College system gives results that are mostly the same as a direct popular vote. (As I discuss in my 2023 book, the major differences have to do with chaos and regional factions.)
Many political scientists think that parliamentary systems are superior to presidential systems; not all for the same reasons, but one argument is that parliaments are led by parties, rather than individual leaders. The United States has steadily moved further and further away from parliamentary systems over time - towards direct elections and away from indirect elections.
Indirect election in the United States
The first draft of the Constitution of the United States put the election of the president in the hands of Congress. So did almost every draft after that until the very last couple of weeks of the Constitutional Convention. It was a natural choice: At the time, every state from South Carolina to New Jersey was governed by a parliamentary system where the highest-ranking executive officer of the state was indirectly elected. The Continental Congress elected its own presiding officer as well.
Before the Constitution was ratified, many Americans only had the right to vote for state legislators and local town or county officials. State legislators appointed a governor or president for the state, any other state-level offices that might need to be filled, and the delegates that state sent to the Continental Congress.
In its original form, the Constitution only added one direct election: Voters would be expected to vote directly for the House of Representatives. Senators would be chosen indirectly by state legislatures, the same way as the governors of most states south of New York, rather than directly by the people, as most governors north of Pennsylvania were. (Pennsylvania itself was a bit of an odd case with an executive council that chose a president - neither a direct election nor via the legislature.)
The election of the president by the Electoral College was intended to be an indirect form of election, in some cases doubly so as the appointments were made by the state legislature or governor.
The first competitive election took place in 1796; to the disappointment of George Washington, it was an election driven by the newly-formed Federalist and Democratic-Republican political parties, two identifiable factions which had mostly lined up behind John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. In his farewell address, Washington complained about the rise of political parties, stating:
They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.
In many nations, the founding hero becomes a leader for life and soon a dictator. In America, Washington stepped aside, but his sentiments seem to have stuck with the American people. Organized political parties have been powerful but never popular.
The indirect nature of the Electoral College did not survive close contact with competitive elections. The most obvious reason to choose an elector was that you knew who they were going to vote for; using their own discretion and deliberation as intended by the Framers was strongly discouraged after 1796. (See in particular this discussion of Samuel Miles.)
In 1824, with no single candidate earning a majority of the electoral vote, Congress chose the president. This provoked widespread fury. By 1828, most electors were chosen directly by an at-large popular vote, and the Electoral College had evolved into a more chaotic version of a direct popular vote. Americans had rejected indirect election of the president as firmly as possible without totally abolishing the Electoral College, demanding electors have allegiance to a pre-arranged presidential candidate instead of making up their own minds.
State governors
Over time, states moved away from legislative appointment of governors. North Carolina is a typical example in many ways. Under the constitution of 1776, written in a period of distrust of singular executives holding too much power (not just George III but the royal governors directly appointed by him), North Carolina’s state legislature appointed a governor annually.
1835, North Carolina adopted a new state constitution. The state legislature was disproportionately elected by districts in the eastern part of the state, which had been settled earlier and now made up a smaller fraction of the state’s population. Popular election of the governor every four years was in line with the sentiments of Jacksonians, and also a political concession to the western regions of the state, who had been regularly shortchanged in the state legislature.
The fact that districts were frequently malapportioned with district lines that were either based on an outdated distribution of population (or simply blatantly unequally drawn) was an ongoing major issue in many states until the 1960s. (I discussed this a bit in the context of the Rucho case here.) More creative forms of gerrymandering remain a significant problem today, but with the rapid growth and rapid redistribution of population that happened in America in the 1800s, most state legislatures had significant malapportionment problems most of the time.
In other words, voters did not trust that legislatures represent the will of the people very well, because they didn’t. In many cases, they still don’t. This problem is likely to persist until and unless states adopt some form of proportional representation for electing state legislatures. Historically, then, American voters wanted and needed governors that were elected directly in order to check state legislatures that weren’t very representative of the state’s population.
Lincoln versus Douglas
In 1858, political parties were rising and falling as much around key individuals as ideas, much as they had been in 1824 and 1796. Illinois had an election for Senate, and the candidates were Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. They held an extensive series of debates that remain famous today, partly because two years later, they were the two leading candidates for the presidency.
That’s the story you probably learned in history class. Except there’s one key problem. Illinois’s state legislature chose who to send to the United States Senate. What were Lincoln and Douglas doing staging a series of debates across Illinois? Make no mistake: They were campaigning to reach the Senate, and expected voters to back the state legislators from their party on their behalf.
State legislators, like presidential electors, were now running on the strength of a pledge to vote for one particular candidate for the United States Senate. This had consequences beyond the appointment of a senator, as state legislators also pass laws at the state level. As it happened, the election result was an odd one; Lincoln won more votes (by the proxy of his pledged supporters), but Douglas won more seats and thus the election. Douglas would be seated in the Senate, and Douglas’s party would run the state government of Illinois for the next two years.
That is not to say that the Lincoln-Douglas election was the only way things went. In other states, especially states where one political party had a solid grip on power, the position of United States Senator was sold for combinations of political and monetary favors, or sometimes left unfilled by a deadlocked state legislature that couldn’t come to agreement. This led to the passage of the 17th Amendment.
Congress and the presidency
In the musical 1776, John Adams opens a song with the following stanza, saying that God has cursed America - not with a flood, a famine, plagues of locusts, or a cataclysmic earthquake. What God has cursed America with is far worse:
But, no, you sent us Congress.
Good God, sir, was that fair?
This lyric has remained an evergreen laugh line since the musical first came out for a very simple reason: Congress has one of the most consistently negative job ratings of anything democratically elected anywhere.
In the last thirty election cycles, there have only been four when most of the public felt that most of Congress deserved to be re-elected. Congress’s approval rating has edged north of 50% only briefly during the 1998-2004 window, and even during that period, it remained mostly below presidential approval ratings. While good polling data is difficult to come by in earlier eras, Congress appears to have been generally unpopular for a very long time.
Voters don’t like Congress. They usually like their own representative, but all those other bozos are pretty terrible as far as they’re concerned. As long as that’s true, Americans will not be willing to move to a parliamentary system. Given the fact that the House has too few seats and suffers from partisan gerrymandering, there’s no reason to expect Americans to want a parliamentary system any time soon.
Congress has to be fixed as an institution before the idea of a parliamentary system becomes palatable; and that means that any reformer or political scientist who puts “switch to a parliamentary system” first on their agenda for the United States is doomed to frustration and failure. The first step towards adopting a parliamentary system is fixing the problems that already exist with Congress.