Political scientists have, since its beginning, been interested in how Democracy works. One point of interest that has often caught the eye of these scholars are the differences between parliamentary and presidential democracies and their advantages and disadvantages when compared to each other. In this essay I will focus on the relationship between the legislature and the executive in both presidential and parliamentary democracies and the ways in which the legislature check the power of the executive. Our hypothesis is that, when we compare both democratic systems, parliaments in presidential democracies are better at checking the power of the executive than in parliamentary democracies. I will answer this theory by way of three different arguments. Firstly, I will show how checks and balances on the executive are done in presidential democracies. Secondly, I will do the same for parliamentary democracies. Finally I will compare the effectiveness of the two to answer our hypothesis.
First, presidentialism is defined by the separation of the executive and legislative powers. It was first done by the United States after the revolution, to make sure that there would not be a return to monarchy and to make sure that either side could not completely overpower the other (Hague and Harrop 2010). In presidential democracies, the executive is elected and in office for a fixed term during which it is very difficult to remove him and the only way to do so is by impeachment which can only be done if there is a case of treason, bribery or other crimes (Hague and Harrop 2010, Lijphart 1992). This gives a certain rigidity to the system which sometimes could end in the executive taking over the legislature if he is given enough power, but there are other ways to contain this power. In the United States dual party system, the president is given very little power, his power is continuously checked by Congress; he is given a veto but “Congress can override his objection” (Hague and Harrop), all his decisions have to be agreed upon in Congress (Lijphart 1992). Since members of Congress are elected separately, they have different agenda’s to the president which means that they will not always vote his way if they are from his party and the executive cannot influence them with the promise of a job since members of Congress cannot be members of the executive branch at the same time. Therefore, in a country where the executive is weak compared to the legislature, it is easy for the legislature to check the executives power.
This is not to say that in a country in which the president is strong, that it is a lot more difficult for the legislature to check the executives power. On the contrary, in Brazil, the president is given a lot of power, but often finds it very difficult to make use of it. The Brazilian multiparty system makes sure that the president’s party is, more often than not, in the minority in the legislature and to make things more difficult, party discipline is very low, which means it is very difficult for the president to bend Congress to his will (Hague and Harrop 2010). This shows that in presidential systems, the power of the executive is always checked by the legislature, it is very difficult for the president to make any decision without the need of the agreement of Congress. Next we will show how checks and balances of the executive are carried out in parliamentary democracies.
Second, while the executive and legislative powers are separated in presidential democracies, in parliamentary democracies the two powers overlap, the government, comprising the prime minister and the cabinet of ministers, which handles the executive, directly emerges from parliament which handles the legislative power. Usually, the prime minister and his cabinet are chosen from the party or coalition of parties that have the majority in parliament. Since party cohesion is strong in parliamentary democracies and since members of parliament can also be members of the executive, it is easy for the government to get votes by promising jobs to MP’s, and thus it is easy to get the majority in parliament for most of the agenda set by the government (Hague and Harrop 2010). Therefore, is it difficult for the legislative to keep the power of the executive in check but there are systems in place to prevent this: Parliament can at any time call for a vote of no confidence to remove the government, there are often debates in parliament during which members of the cabinet have to defend their propositions, there are small committee investigations in which bills are discussed in detail (Hague and Harrop 2010, Rhodes et al. 2006, Lijphart 1993). This gives the legislature many possibilities to check the power of the executive, which makes parliamentary democracies very effective at doing so. We will now move on to compare the effectiveness of the checks carried out on the executive between presidential and parliamentary democracies.
Finally, now that we have seen how the checks and balances work in both presidential and parliamentary democracies, we can compare the effectiveness of the two. On the one hand, in presidential democracies, the government and legislature cannot remove each other from power and each are elected for defined terms which makes it rigid and we can also see that, although there are lots of checks and balances carried out by the legislature, more often than not, presidential systems become authoritarian regimes because the executive was given too much power and changed the constitution. Whereas in parliamentary democracies, the vote of no confidence gives a possibility to remove the government if there is wrongful use of power by the executive which makes them more flexible than presidential democracies. This can be seen in the findings from both Stepan and Skach (1993) and Mainwaring and Shugart (1993) that show that the survival rate of presidential democracies is 20% whereas for parliamentary democracies it is 60%. On the other hand, it is often said that the effectiveness of checks and balances in parliamentary democracies depends on parliament being more powerful than the government, which most of the time isn’t the case, as we can see in the report done by Penning (2000) in which he finds that in most parliamentary democracies, parliaments have less power than the government, whereas in presidential democracies, the executive is more often less powerful than the legislature which increases the effectiveness of the checks and balances. Thus, we have compared the effectiveness of the checks carried out by the legislature on the executive in both parliamentary and presidential democracies.
In conclusion, the theory was that, in comparison to presidential democracies, parliaments in parliamentary democracies are less able to check the executive. We have answered this hypothesis by looking at three different points. We saw how checks and balances on the executive are carried out in both presidential and parliamentary democracies and we showed how they both compared to each other in terms of effectiveness. We can say that both have very complex ways of checking the power of the executive, both have advantages and disadvantages but we cannot really say if one is worse than the other at doing so. Thus we can conclude by asserting that neither of them can check the power of the executive more than the other and therefore that this hypothesis is wrong.