Proportional representation and presidentialism work just fine together

The truly dysfunctional combination is presidentialism and two-party hyper-partisan polarization

Back in 2018, when I was writing Breaking The Two-Party Doom Loop and stress-testing the ideas in the book, I took part in a Stanford University conference on political parties. 

When I argued the United States needed more than just two political parties, a few of the comparative scholars at the conference pressed me on one point: Could multiparty democracy really work within a presidential system?

Or more specifically, they asked: “Haven’t you read Mainwaring 1993: ‘Presidentialism, Multipartism, and Democracy: The Difficult Combination’?”. (Yes, academics really do sometimes talk in author-date citation-ese.)

I confessed I hadn’t.

“Well,” they said. “You really need to.” 

So I did. As the article’s title suggested, the track record of multiparty presidentialism as of 1993 was indeed difficult (more on that shortly). Scott Mainwaring was a leading authority in comparative political science and at the time (2018) a Harvard professor. (Currently, he teaches at the University of Notre Dame.) The article was field-defining. It now has more than 1,900 academic citations and counting. 

How little I could have then imagined that five years later, there would be a new paper, Mainwaring and Drutman, 2023: The Case for Multiparty Presidentialism in the U.S.   

As I came to learn, Scott had updated his views (as thoughtful people sometimes do). Decades of more recent scholarship had shown that the combination of a multiparty legislature and a separately elected president worked just fine.

So we teamed up to write a white paper together.  Scott was a true delight as a collaborator.

In this post, I want to go through the arguments of our paper.  But first, to help situate our arguments, I want to start with a little comparative politics 101.  I suspect many readers are not super-familiar with democracies beyond our shores. 

“So delighted our pre-electoral multiparty coalition won a majority of seats in Congress. Now let’s get to work and do the people’s business running this great country.”

Comparative Politics 101: You don’t need a parliamentary system to have proportional representation.

I’ve been arguing the case for proportional representation (PR) for a solid six years now. I’ve heard repeated pushback that PR requires a parliamentary system. This often stems from confusion about how voting and governing systems work (or don’t work) together. 

Like many Americans who hadn’t given much thought to electoral systems around the world (prior to 2016, when I started thinking about this all),  I was aware that most Western European countries are parliamentary democracies using proportional representation. It’s possible I mistakenly assumed these elements always coexist. Perhaps I succumbed to the conjunction fallacy. Who knows?

So on the possibility that you are like I was (vaguely aware of alternatives), let’s start here, with a little explainer.

Imagine you were establishing a new representative democracy in a new country. You would have many institutional choices to make. The world has many democracies, and no two have the same set of governing institutions.

But two of the most significant choices would be 1) whether or not to have an independently elected president or a prime minister elected by a parliament); and 2) under what voting system to hold legislative elections (majoritarian or proportional?)

On point #1: To president, or not to president? That is the question.

Is it better to have a prime minister selected by and accountable to the legislature, as the head of government? 

Or is it better to have a president elected independently of the legislature, serving as head of a separate branch of government?

An independently elected president gives you a presidential system. A prime minister selected by the legislature gives you a parliamentary system. 

On point #2: How should you elect members of your legislature? 

Do you want a majoritarian system, with winner-take-all districts, which will tend towards two dominant parties? 

Or do you want a proportional system, with multi-winner districts, which will likely give you more parties? (Nota bene: the number of parties will depend on how many winners there are per district. The more concurrent winners, the more potential parties.)

With these major design choices in place, you have four possible institutional combinations, represented here by this nice little graphic:

Notably, the least common combination among global democracies is the combination that the US has — presidentialism and winner-take-all elections. Our company includes: Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.

Of course, there are many other institutional variations.¹ And as we see in the image below, there are also some hybrid systems:

But if you were building a democracy like building a bowl at Chipotle, you’d choose your base and your protein first. So if you want to think of the majoritarian/proportional and parliamentary/presidential choice as the choice between rice/greens and chicken/carnitas, go ahead. It’s fine. It will at least give you a sense of the modularity of democracy design, and a sense that some combinations are better than others, but there is no perfect combination. 

The (alleged) perils of presidentialism

If you’ve been reading my substack (and my other writing), you probably know that I think proportional voting systems are far superior to majoritarian voting systems, and that having a modest number of parties (I think 4-6 is a sweet spot) is better than just two. 

But what about the parliamentary vs presidential system debate? In some ways, this is a moot point for the United States, because absent a new constitution, the United States will not become a parliamentary system. 

Most comparative democracy scholars would probably come down on the side of a parliamentary system, because of its flexibility and governing efficiency. By contrast, in a presidential system, the propensity for inter-branch conflict and a fixed electoral timetable can lead to impasse and deadlock.

At least, that has been the standard assumption since Juan Linz’s 1990 classic article, “The Perils of Presidentialism.”

Juan Linz, who warned of the perils of presidentialism.

The central dilemma, Linz saw, was the dual legitimacy problem. Presidents and legislatures can both claim to represent the people. What if they can’t resolve disagreements? Immobilism, gridlock, and democratic breakdown might follow. In a parliamentary system, without separation of powers, the prime minister and the legislature are united, and so the legitimacy of both rise and fall together.

Fixed terms also seemed to pose a problem. In a parliamentary system, legislatures could force out leaders who no longer had public confidence. In a presidential system, presidents were mostly assured a full term, regardless of performance. Impeachment was a costly remedy.

Moreover, the high-stakes, winner-take-all nature of fixed term elections drove an all-or-nothing zero-sum dynamic, which dangerously polarized politics. Parliamentary systems, Linz argued, “more often give representation to a number of parties. Power-sharing and coalition-forming are fairly common, and incumbents are accordingly attentive to the demands and interests of even the smaller parties. These parties in turn retain expectations of sharing in power and, therefore, of having a stake in the system as a whole.”

But in a presidential system, “the conviction that he possesses independent authority and a popular mandate is likely to imbue a president with a sense of power and mission, even if the plurality that elected him is a slender one." Presidents are likely to over-claim their mandate. 

And because of the plebiscite nature of presidential elections, presidents are more likely to be demagogic, populist outsiders than prime ministers, who must ascend to party leadership more gradually. 

In the 1970s and 1980s, presidential systems in Latin America (where presidential systems were most common) had gone through a rough time. Writing in 1990, it was certainly possible to draw such conclusions. However, in 1990 Linz had to reckon with the United States which was — inconveniently for his argument — also a presidential system, and, per Linz’s time-capsule assessment, “the world's most stable democracy.”

 Linz largely demurred on why the US was so stable despite the unfortunate institutional choice of presidentialism. But he suggested it might have something to do with the political parties. “[T]he uniquely diffuse character of American political parties-which, ironically, exasperates many American political scientists and leads them to call for responsible, ideologically disciplined parties-has something to do with it.” 

Indeed, at the time, the two major US parties were broad, overlapping, and often incoherent coalitions, lacking the clear ideological distinctions they would acquire over the subsequent three decades.

Since Linz’s 1990 piece, the world has of course changed. For example, the United States is no longer the world’s most stable democracy. And American political parties have become considerably more polarized. 

Some scholars have even come to re-appreciate the value of a presidential system, with a single national leader elected by the entire country and empowered to act on behalf of that majority, as opposed to a legislature of multiple parties and parochial geographic representation, and all the slow and painful bargaining that comes with it. 

Or, a moderate claim: electing different individuals to different offices allows voters to prioritize different concerns. Choosing a president is different from choosing a legislative representative. In a parliamentary system, voters have only indirect say over the prime minister. Maybe the more precise representation from two choices is a good thing, assuming voters use it?

The new consensus on presidentialism and PR: the combination works just fine.

A lot has changed since 1993. Mounting scholarship has shown that whatever might be wrong with presidentialism, the problems don’t come from the inability to form governing coalitions. 

Here, for example, is a selection of representative conclusions from various scholarly overviews.

●         ”Twenty years of research have shown presidentialism to be remarkably durable, and in particular its multiparty variant has vastly overperformed relative to early predictions.”² 

●         “The Cassandra views with which we began are not only ungrounded but also largely false. Government coalitions are less frequent under presidentialism than under parliamentarism, but the difference is one of degree, not of kind. Highly fractionalized legislatures turn out to promote coalitions in both systems. Single-party minority governments are not less successful in the legislature than coalition governments, minority or majority. Legislative paralysis appears to be a rare phenomenon.”³

●         “The ability of multiparty presidentialism to subsist with sustainable democracy is beyond dispute… multiparty presidentialism has boosted political stability, and has not degenerated into systemic corruption as long as robust political competition and a set of strong autonomous institutions exist alongside it to keep its potential excesses within bounds”⁴

●         “The Linzian interpretation of presidentialism is probably too pessimistic. Presidents in Latin America are not always the inflexible and imperial leaders previously characterized by Linz.”⁵

●         "We do not find dominant or deadlocked presidents; instead we observe differences in the extent to which presidents succeed in enacting their programs and, perhaps more interestingly, how this is achieved.”⁶ 

Thus, as Scott and I write in the paper:

“Since the early 1990s, scholarship on presidentialism, electoral systems, and democratic stability has challenged the earlier pessimism about the combination of presidentialism and PR. As scholars have expanded their cases, refined their data analyses and deepened their institutional understanding—and as far more democracies have used the combination of presidentialism and PR—a more nuanced understanding has emerged.

“For well over a decade now, the growing conventional wisdom has been that presidentialism and PR can work well together. The newer literature has shown that coalitional presidentialism, in which the president’s party shares power with others through cabinet appointments and other mechanisms, is a common and perfectly viable institutional combination.”

As we note in a related, shorter article in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas titled “PR and Presidentialism: Yes, We Can” (part of a larger symposium, For a Better Democracy: Proportional Representation), there are plenty of successful examples:

“Proportional representation (PR) and presidentialism has already proven a successful and resilient combination in quite a few countries. Examples of robust, stable democracies that use this combination include Costa Rica, Cyprus, Chile, and Uruguay.

“These democracies have exhibited effective collaboration between presidents and legislatures. Chile restored democracy in 1990 after 17 years of military dictatorship, and as was the case for much of the 1932-73 period, its combination of multipartyism and presidentialism has functioned generally well since. For decades, Uruguay and Costa Rica have also had presidential systems with proportional representation for the lower chamber (or, in Costa Rica, the sole chamber) of the national congress. Uruguay reestablished democracy in 1985 after 12 years of authoritarian rule; before the 1973 coup, it had a long democratic heritage that combined presidentialism (from 1952-66 as a popularly elected nine-person executive with a fixed four-year term) and PR. Until 1971, electoral competition revolved mainly around two traditional parties; since redemocratization, the country has had three main parties. Costa Rica has the oldest democracy in the Global South, and its democracy has combined presidentialism and proportional representation since 1950.”

But how would it work here?

Because the president sits at the center of the American political imagination, many conversations about multiparty democracy assume that either:

 1) we would have far too many parties running presidential candidates, which would be a disaster;

2) the winner-take-all nature of presidential elections would keep the United States as a two-party system no matter how Congress gets elected; or 

3) Congress would become even more of a mess with multiple parties, and presidents would constantly be at odds with Congress.

These are all reasonable concerns, but they seem very unlikely based on what has happened in other countries. And there are definitely ways to mitigate these potential problems. 

The fundamental logic behind multiparty presidentialism is quite simple. Because presidential elections are single-winner elections, most energy and attention flows to the two leading candidates. 

Most presidential democracies have two-round elections for president to narrow the field and ensure a majority winner. But even before the second round, two leading candidates typically emerge, and for a pretty good reason: pre-electoral coalitions.

In the majority of multiparty system presidential elections, the winning candidate is also supported by a winning coalition of parties in the concurrent legislative election. Practically, this means that multiple parties back the same presidential candidate. Then, after the election, cabinet positions and congressional committee posts get divvied up in rough proportion to how well the parties did electorally. 

To imagine how this would work, imagine that the US House were elected proportionally, and a three party coalition — Progressives, Moderate Democrats, and Constitutional Republicans — backed Joe Biden, of the Moderate Democrats, for president. Say Progressives won 20% of seats in the legislature, Moderate Democrats won 25% of seats, and Constitutional Republicans won 10% of seats, and Biden won. 

Now, after the election, this Biden coalition would have a working majority in the House. Committee chairmanships could be allocated in proportion to these percentages, and the parties could form a governing agreement to distribute access to the floor for votes, perhaps through a rules committee (as Congress has often operated. The idea of an all-powerful Speaker is relatively rare throughout American history.). 

The Senate might have a slightly different balance of power. But historically, the Senate has operated as a much more freewheeling institution, with more decentralized access to the agenda. It could do so again. 

This three-party coalition would also get cabinet posts in proportion to their relative electoral strength. A multiparty cabinet is the most common way that presidents build majority coalitions in multiparty presidential systems around the world.

Sometimes, a presidents cannot assemble a majority before or even after the election. But this is not necessarily a problem. It just requires more complex deal-making. But it also may be more responsive, if it reflects genuine public opinion. As we write in the white paper:

“Sometimes presidents will lead a minority government, in which they constantly have to bargain with the legislature. In the United States, we would call this divided government. It is quite common. A minority government does not necessarily lead to immobilism. Instead, presidents bargain with opposing parties on an ad hoc basis.  In some ways, this can be normatively desirable. A minority government that builds majority coalitions on an issue-by-issue basis is most likely to reflect majority sentiment on every issue.”

The key point is this: all governing is coalition politics. In a two-party system, those coalitions are within the two dominant parties. In a multi-party system, those coalitions form across multiple parties. 

One distinct advantage of a multi-party governing coalition is that it becomes much clearer how much public support the different parties within the coalition have. This creates a clearer representative benchmark for how many cabinet positions and committee chairs each party should get.

The balance of a multiparty coalition would be especially clear if we also adopted fusion voting for presidential elections.

A new Protect Democracy report, “Fusion Voting and a Revitalized Role for Minor Parties in Presidential Elections” by Cyrena Kokolis and Beau Tremitiere, makes a compelling and urgent case for fusion voting in presidential elections.  Newsweek editor-at-large Tom Rogers made a similar argument in his new piece “The Presidential Election Needs More Parties, Not More Candidates.”  As Rogers writes, in response to third parties entering the 2024 election: “the answer is not for minor parties to throw in the towel: in a diverse and pluralistic society like ours, we would benefit from more than two outlets for constructive political expression and association. Instead, we should allow minor parties to cross-nominate one of the two competitive, major party candidates.”  

Another advantage of proportional representation for Congress is that midterm elections could operate slightly differently. They would more likely lead to  a small adjustment in the coalition, rather than a wild swing.

Let’s imagine some supporters of the Biden coalition were frustrated come midterms. If they wanted the Progressives to have more power in the coalition, they could campaign for the Progressives. If they wanted the Constitutional Republicans to have more power, they could campaign for the Constitutional Republicans. 

Right now, the only opportunity voters have in a midterm is to either stay home or vote for the other party. Either way, a small change in vote totals can lead to a wild shift in the congressional agenda. This tremendously increases the likelihood of governing deadlock.

Only a handful of seats changed parties between 2020 and 2022. Yet, going from a small Democratic House majority to a small Republican House majority dramatically changed the productivity of Congress. So far, the current Congress is on track to be the least productive Congress in a very, very long time. 

Thus, as we argue in the paper, the current arrangement is quite dangerous

“Today, American government is constrained by a mismatch between governing rules and electoral rules, hobbled by an inconsistency among governing institutions designed to restrain simple majorities. An increasingly majoritarian partisan style of campaigning that seeks one party dominance has likewise put the American system of governance under threat. When campaigns dismiss the other party as a threat to the nation, the compromise necessary for governing becomes difficult to find. Gridlock and brinksmanship follow. Distrust builds distrust, leading to overpromising—and more disappointment. It is a cycle that contributes to growing radicalism.”

Now that we know the combination works just fine, it’s time to get the details right

Obviously, the details matter, and there are indeed many details to be worked out. Not all proportional systems are the same, and the constitutional powers of presidents vary across countries (The American presidency is on the weak end of the spectrum, at least with formal constitutional powers.)

We must consider some other possibilities for how the House and Senate might operate and how the branches of government should relate to each other.

Nonetheless, the first step is to update our understanding of what is even possible, based on three decades of solid scholarship.

As we concluded in our paper:

“The new scholarly consensus is that multiparty presidentialism is capable of working just fine. Presidents build coalitions in many ways, and they frequently succeed in passing their programs. As long as moderate parties are well represented in the legislature, presidents (except for those with strong illiberal tendencies) typically gravitate towards the policy middle, often showing remarkable flexibility in response to changing political winds—and sometimes to the frustration of their parties. 

“Certainly, detractors of the combination can pick examples that have gone sideways. But as we have shown, most presidential democracies have proportional multiparty lower chambers. Breakdown is the exception, not the norm…

“Whatever concerns about presidentialism exist, there is no evidence that a system makes presidentialism function better. If a two-party system works well with presidentialism, it is only when that two-party system produces nonideological, moderate parties. Whatever risks exist in combining presidentialism and multipartyism in the United States, they are far fewer than doing nothing and maintaining the divisive us-against-them status quo.”

Sometimes opinions change. There was a time when we didn’t think ice cream and olive oil went well together. Now we know better. 

Proportional representation and presidentialism go together like olive oil and vanilla ice cream. Unexpectedly balanced.

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1. *The comparative politics 201 version would add in bicameralism, and federalism, judicial review but then things get even more complicated. But before we fall down the rabbit hole of nuance, move along… Or if you want an excellent primer on institutional design choices, I highly recommend A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective

2. Chaisty, Paul, Nic Cheeseman, and Timothy Power. “Rethinking the ‘Presidentialism Debate’: Conceptualizing Coalitional Politics in Cross-Regional Perspective.” Democratization 21, no. 1 (January 2, 2014): 72–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2012.710604.

3. José Antonio Cheibub, Adam Przeworski, and Sebastian M. Saiegh, “Government Coalitions and Legislative Success Under Presidentialism and Parliamentarism,” British Journal of Political Science 34, no. 4 (October 2004): 579, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123404000195.

4. Pereira, Carlos, and Marcus André Melo. “The Surprising Success of Multiparty Presidentialism.” Journal of Democracy 23, no. 3 (July 2012): 156–70. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2012.0041.

5. Christian Arnold, David Doyle, and Nina Wiesehomeier, “Presidents, Policy Compromise, and Legislative Success,” The Journal of Politics 79, no. 2 (April 2017): 392, https://doi.org/10.1086/688080.

6.  Eduardo Alemán and George Tsebelis, Legislative Institutions and Lawmaking in Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2016), 225.