Parliamentary America by Maxwell L. Stearns: a friendly critical review
It is often said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It could also be said that it is easier to imagine another civil war in the United States than the radical reform of its constitution. In coming weeks we’ll be treated to the latest dystopian cinematic vision of the US political system breaking down. Save the popcorn instead for Parliamentary America, a utopian (or, as author Maxwell L. Stearns calls it, optimistic) vision of how cataclysm could be avoided. In this review, I agree with much of it in spirit, quibble about some of the details, and hope the book helps open up the conversation about our options.
If you still have a bookstore in your vicinity, and it has a section titled something like “Current Events”, you’ll see that many authors believe the US is in dire political crisis. Unlike most of them, Maxwell L. Stearns does not dwell on living actors such as Trump or Biden, but instead goes after the revered men who founded the republic. A professor of constitutional law, Stearns writes very candidly about coming to the “deeply personal and existential” realization that the Framers “fundamentally misconceived how our electoral system and system of executive accountability would affect our politics and culture” (p. 241). While various amendments and statutes have corrected some of the unintended consequences of the Philadelphia Convention, it remains a problematic model that Stearns says has become gridlocked, “ratfucked”, and downright sinister in the Information Age.
Stearns addresses and dispatches the kinds of fixes that others have proposed, such as replacing the Electoral College with a popular vote or compact, or adopting instant run-off voting, or term limits for Congress. These cosmetic patches would introduce problems of their own, while not being radically commensurate to the current crisis. In seeking remedies, he decides, “We must humbly learn from other nations’ experiences as well as our own” (p. 141).
Virginia Plan 2.0
Part of our own experience is the Virginia Plan that James Madison and Gov. Edmund Randolph brought to Philadelphia in 1787. Its seventh resolution provided that “a National Executive be instituted; to be chosen by the National Legislature”, which would in turn consist of a directly elected house that would appoint a second chamber drawn from nominees of the state legislatures. From today’s vantage point, we would describe this as a parliamentary model, reflecting the practice in many of the first state constitutions, including Virginia’s, whereby governors such as Randolph were chosen by state legislatures, sometimes annually. Once it became clear at the Convention that the second chamber (Senate) would not reflect differences in population, and that small states would thus have an outsized say in the selection of the president, Madison underwent a complete change of heart. Instead, he endorsed the method we now call the Electoral College, which Alexander Hamilton promised in Federalist 68 would reduce the risk of “tumult and disorder”, “heats and ferments”, “cabal, intrigue, and corruption”. As Stearns notes, Hamilton himself promptly engaged in intrigue to resolve the tumult and disorder of the 1800 election, which showed that the original design already needed repair (the Twelfth Amendment). Meanwhile, several states maintained election of governors by legislatures well into the nineteenth century — until 1837 in Maryland, where Stearns teaches, and until 1851 in Virginia.
In effect, Stearns is retrieving the lost heritage of parliamentary government in the US, proposing a modern Virginia Plan in which the House of Representatives would choose the president and vice-president, and could remove them for “maladministration” (a lower bar than for impeachment). The House in turn would be elected through a mixed-member proportional (MMP) electoral system, in which electors vote for a representative in a single-seat district under plurality rules (as at present) but also for a party and its closed list of candidates, with seats awarded to arrive at overall approximation to the share of the vote. The appeal of MMP is that it retains the tie to a constituency while uncorking the multiparty coalition politics that is latent in the US but throttled by the major-party duopoly.
I was attracted to this book because of my own default preference for parliamentary systems, which is partly a matter of professional judgement (based on findings from comparative political science) and partly of personal sentiment: as a UK as well as US citizen who has lived, worked, paid taxes and voted in both countries (with the chance to vote under MMP for the Greater London Assembly), I have come to favor the style and flow of a parliamentary system. Having said that, I know from experience and from study never to idealize any country or type of government, or to over-invest in any constitutional or electoral reform as a miracle cure. Stearns likewise is fully aware of the pitfalls and trade-offs from his tour of several countries described in chapter 5.
Of those countries, Germany is the one closest to what Stearns has in mind, but still with meaningful differences. Stearns is trying to be radical yet no more radical than needed, offering bounded innovations in “a manner that remains uniquely American” (p. 235). While I understand that this makes his proposals more palatable to the unconverted, I also wonder if they would withhold the full benefits of the shift to a more parliamentary and more proportional system. For me the inspiration would be one country Stearns did not get to, New Zealand, and perhaps the place to start would be not at the federal level that Stearns concentrates on, but below that, in states like the Iowa I live in.
Parliamentary trial runs
Let’s think about the potential to experiment at the subnational level. Why, after all, do we replicate the federal model everywhere except Nebraska, rather than take advantage of the states as laboratories, where things could be tested before asking their consent to the bold constitutional amendments that Stearns proposes?
I bring this up because I wonder whether some of the apparent attractions of the parliamentary system are related to the size of its showcases. Without making too much of the annual rankings of countries, if we take the Economist Democracy Index (which Stearns cites) for 2023, most of the top 12 of the 24 countries rated as “full” democracies were not just parliamentary and using proportional representation (PR), but also of similar population:
- Norway: 5,474,360
- New Zealand: 5,228,100
- Iceland: 375,318
- Sweden: 10,612,086
- Finland: 5,545,475
- Denmark: 5,910,913
- Ireland: 5,056,935
- Switzerland: 8,796,669
- Netherlands: 17,618,299
- Taiwan: 23,923,276
- Luxembourg: 654,768
- Germany: 83,294,633
The median population of this happy dozen is the mean of Denmark and Switzerland: 7,353,791 (comparable to that of Arizona). (Switzerland is probably close to the median for all countries in the world as well.)
If we take the whole set of 24 “full democracies”, the median shifts to the mean of Austria and Greece: 9,650,118 (between New Jersey and Michigan).
It is striking how many are in the five-million range — five of the top 12, and six of the 24. Finland’s population is almost the same as Minnesota’s, while New Zealand’s population today is around that of the United States in 1800.
Parliamentarizing state government would, on my preference, result in something akin to New Zealand’s Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, and the Welsh Senedd: unicameral and elected through MMP. (Let’s wave a wand and make redundant senates vanish in all but the bigger states, where they could be elected using the single transferable vote in multiseat districts as for four Australian state upper houses, although past US experience with STV might caution against that.) After each election, the new chamber would elect one of their own to serve as a coterminous governor. If states did not fall in with the ones that currently have four-year house terms (Alabama, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi and North Dakota), it may seem bizarre to tether governors to two-year terms, but that’s what many states used to do and Vermont and New Hampshire still do. (Vermont also provides for the legislature to select the governor if no candidate wins a majority of the popular vote.)
A House corrected and enlarged
Imagine that good results from these state laboratories generate a groundswell of demand for federal parliamentary government that overcomes the high barriers to constitutional change. Here we come to the heart of the alternative sketched out in Part III of Parliamentary America.
For sound, practical reasons, Stearns envisions keeping the existing 435 district seats in the House of Representatives: incumbents would be less resistant to change if they were not being asked to put themselves out of office. The public might also be reassured by keeping the link to an identifiable individual, although Renwick and Pilet’s study of personalized ballots found “no boost in turnout or in satisfaction with democracy” when voting is candidate-centered. (Another study found that it improves satisfaction only among more knowledgeable voters. In general, the correlation between electoral system and satisfaction level or turnout is not very strong.)
In keeping with his German-influenced vision of MMP, Stearns proposes to add another 435 seats, which would be allocated to parties proportionally, taking into account how many district seats they already hold and whether they crossed a formal threshold share of the vote (such as 5 percent).
Stearns then works hard to assure us that an 870-member House would be manageable, and I agree that the number is not as daunting as it may sound. My reservations are whether that would actually be the optimal size for the chamber, and whether the public would recoil at the likely price tag.
On the latter concern, Congress already spends around $6.7 billion on itself. I don’t begrudge it one penny — we know from other countries that the strength of a modern legislature lies not so much in its formal powers as in the ability of legislators to amass the support team to advise them on complex issues and bill-writing, and help them understand constituents’ needs. Without staff, elected members are at the mercy of the executive branch, lobbyists, and donors. If anything, Congress has probably been undercutting itself in recent years and needs to spend more on resources, especially on scientific and technical advice.
I fear, however, that doubling the members of the House, while leaving the Senate intact, would be very hard to sell to the stressed taxpayer. Opponents would be able to demagogue the idea toward a speedy demise.
The architectural realities of the Capitol estate would also be a mundane but very real constraint — where would all these extra House members sit? In the gallery? Where would their offices be located? One study assures us that these are trifling considerations — the House chamber is rarely used to capacity, and new offices could be built nearby (it’s been 40 years since the newest, the Hart Senate Building, was completed, at a cost in today’s dollars of more than $400 million, while the more recent Capitol Visitor Center cost $621 million); those authors, however, were contemplating a more modest expansion, not a doubling of the House membership.
Then there is the question of whether the House actually needs to be that much bigger.
Stearns is right not to feel obliged to stick to the rule of thumb basing the number of seats on the cube root of a country’s population, which in the US would be around 700. However, an alternative estimate puts the line of best fit at n* (seats) = 0.21 x 𝑁 (number of inhabitants) to the power of 0.421, which for a US population of 341 million would be 721 in the House and 100 in the Senate — thus, more than the cube root but fewer than what Stearns proposes.
Getting the best out of MMP
We would thus be operating under MMP in the “additional member” guise used in New Zealand, Scotland, Wales, and Bolivia, with 435 district seats and 286 compensatory list seats (which could be pushed to 300 if a round number is easier for people to digest).
Would this 60:40 blend hit what Daniel Bochsler calls the “sweet spot”, where an MMP system achieves an approximately proportional outcome with the minimal necessary number of list seats (such that most of whatever disproportionality occurs is mild and artificially induced by an eligibility threshold)?
We can crudely infer that it would, going by the similar ratio of district-to- list seats and consistently proportional results in New Zealand (less so in Scotland and much less so in Wales, where the district-to-list seat ratio is 2:1 rather than 3:2). It would probably also result in a shift in the effective number of parties from 2.00 to something in the 3.00 to 3.50 range — breaking up the duopoly but not taking fragmentation to extremes. However, Bochsler warns that mixed systems are not immune to strategic manipulation by larger parties, so we cannot be certain of getting “the best of both worlds” until we know more specifics, in particular how the list tier would be structured.
This is where I had misgivings about the assumption in Parliamentary America that the list seats would be distributed within each state. It would work fine in the scenario that Stearns offers on p. 191, using Washington state, which has 10 district seats, to which he would add 10 list seats. But I know from studying the Czech electoral system that using territorial units as multi-seat districts generates resentment (and litigation) if some of the units fall below the Goldilocks zone of district magnitude owing to their small populations.
Keep in mind that 15 states currently have House delegations of three or fewer seats, at which point it gets harder to have enough in play to meet actionable expectations of proportionality. Let’s take the scenario Stearns imagines for Washington and apply it to my neighbors in Nebraska, with three district seats and three list seats. Stearns imagines four parties in contention; I’ll keep his Washington percentages but rearrange the vote shares for a more likely Nebraska breakdown.
America First — 39 percent
Republicans — 29 percent
Democrats — 20 percent
Progressives — 10 percent
Stearns assumes that 39 percent of the vote could net 70 percent of district seats, so let’s give America First two of the three, with the third going to Republicans. If we allocate the list seats using Hare quotas and largest remainders (Stearns does not specify what kind of PR would be used, but this could be sold as the “Hamiltonian” method), Republicans have a remainder of 0.74 from their proportional share of the six total seats, so get one list seat. Democrats can claim 1.2 list seats, and Progressives 0.6 list seats. This works out to a 2–2–1–1 distribution, at which point we can imagine the likely grumbling from Democrats (with twice the vote share of Progressives but the same number of seats).
One of the attractions of PR, as Seth Masket argues, is that it would allow greater opportunity for local parties to compete, so let’s imagine a scenario along the lines of:
America First — 35 percent
Republicans — 29 percent
Democrats — 24 percent
Progressives — 8 percent
Cornhuskers for Cannabis — 4 percent
If America First still won two seats and the Republicans one district seat and one list seat, Democrats take one seat, Progressives pick up one (their 0.48 remainder pips the Democrats’ 0.44), and Cornhuskers for Cannabis get nothing. Imagine the now audible outcry of Democrats with three times the vote share of the Progressives but the same number of seats. It would only get worse as we move to the states currently with two House seats or just one, especially if there were not 435 list seats to spread around but something closer to 300. Other kinds of PR (such as the “Jeffersonian” D’Hondt) might make the Democrats happier, but at the expense of the smaller parties, which would defeat the purpose of shifting to PR.
Election geeks can probably poke holes in my math (it’s not my forte) or see ways to fix this, but I would favor letting the states keep their current district seats while filling the compensatory list seats from votes pooled in multi-state regions, which could be based on existing divisions such as time zones or climate regions or census regions or the circuits of the federal courts of appeals. Seats could be apportioned to the regions before an election based on census data or after the election based on turnout. Within those regions, seats could also be reserved for Native American tribes, and for voters in Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and other territories. Having this regional tier would improve policy responsiveness as well as representation, since one Swiss study found that “congruence of the majority of representatives with the preferences of the majority of their constituents strongly increases with district magnitude”.
While we’re dreaming, there are some other electoral features of parliamentary systems that the US might consider emulating. One would be a proper federal elections agency along the lines of Elections Canada and the Australian Electoral Commission. It would not usurp secretaries of state as the chief election officers, but could provide an independent certification of results and greater administrative uniformity. It could also be the manager of an integrated national electoral roll, operate a single system of voter registration (Canada’s claims to reach 95 percent of eligible voters), and pre-register future voters aged 14–17. Canada, Australia and other parliamentary countries also have ample experience with nonpartisan boundary commissions that avoid the gerrymandering that Stearns identifies as one of the ways US politics is so “ratfucked”.
The parliamentary presidency
To be only as radical as necessary, Stearns keeps as much of Articles I and II undisturbed as possible. Thus, it will still be a presidential executive, combining the head of state and head of government. This is understandable: since the 1940s, the American presidency has been inseparable from the task of commander-in-chief of a nuclear superpower, and it taxes the mind too much to think about whether the “football” (the briefcase with launch codes) should follow a president with largely ceremonial duties (as in Germany) or a premier who has power but does not embody national sovereignty (British prime ministers can get away with it because they exercise crown prerogative; India and Pakistan appear to put their nuclear weapons under collective command authorities). Like it or not (and it was not intended by the Founders), the US has become a “presidential nation”, and for international as well as domestic reasons the office must not be seen to be diminished by the new mode of election.
Sticking with a presidency that is unchanged in every respect other than how it is elected means that we will not be in the categories associated with the higher democracy scores. While still associated with better performance than a directly elected presidency or French-style semi-presidential hybrid, republics in which the legislature elects a single executive trail behind constitutional monarchies (the best democracies!) and republics with prime ministers and ceremonial presidents (Germany, Ireland, etc.).
The model Stearns proposes is not commonly found in real life, but bears a resemblance to the arrangements in South Africa and Botswana. In South Africa, after the new National Assembly is elected under highly proportional representation (coming up on 29 May), it will choose someone from its ranks to serve as president for the duration of the parliament’s five-year term. The president then chooses another assembly member to be their deputy, and no more than two cabinet ministers can be from outside the legislature. The deputy president or one of the ministers also acts as leader of government business in the National Assembly. The president can be forced from office by a no-confidence vote (simple majority), as can their cabinet separately. Many unsuccessful attempts at no-confidence votes have been held over 30 years, but two presidents have resigned under pressure from their party (the ANC).
In Parliamentary America, Stearns builds in a higher bar for no-confidence — 60 percent of all House members would have to support the motion — to prevent a constant seating and unseating of presidents. Furthermore, a motion could be made only on a claim of “maladministration”, which he defines through a non-exhaustive list of bad behavior short of high crimes and misdemeanours, such as “systematic ineffectiveness in working with cabinet members or other officials”, “systematic embarrassment of behalf of the nation”, and “a documented pattern of conveying misinformation to the public or in official communications”. There would still have to be an investigation by the House to substantiate the claims before a vote would be held. One can imagine from recent impeachments how that investigatory process would play out in our media thunderdome. There would indubitably be legal arguments over the meaning of “maladministration” and “systematic” (and what other unlisted kinds of wrongdoing would qualify) that would end up at the Supreme Court, and I’m not jazzed by anything these days that would require the justices’ opinion.
Also in the interest of continuity, the president would be elected to a four-year term, but the House would still run on its two-year hamster wheel. We would thus still be treated to midterm elections, which could result in a governing party or coalition different from the one that put the president in office. Since Stearns stipulates that the House could not unseat a president just because it disagrees with his or her policy objectives, the US would still be at risk of prolonged logjams between the two branches, and thus not seeing much improvement from the status quo. Limiting the grounds for removal to some form of “maladministration” would also take away the flexibility of what the Australians gently call a “spill” and Canadians even more gently call a “leadership review”, allowing a party to replace the leader simply because they’ve lost their touch (or, as in the case of the UK’s Liz Truss, never found it).
One thing I loved about this book is its embrace of coalition politics as a good thing, not an avoidable or unavoidable evil. The top performers on the democracy charts almost always have either coalition or minority governments, and their formation is not always a pretty process. (As I write, the Netherlands is still struggling to form a government after its elections last November). However, apart from how the president and vice-president would be chosen, I did not get much of a picture from Stearns of coalition politics in the fuller sense, which I equate with haggling over cabinet portfolios and agreeing on some kind of joint program that reconciles the participating parties’ manifestos. The State of the Union address would be, like throne speeches in Commonwealth realms, an agenda-setter for the start of a new legislative session. I gather from Stearns that the president-Senate confirmation tango would continue, but would the president, vice-president and members of the cabinet themselves have to have been elected to Congress in order to be eligible?
To get the full effect of parliamentarizing, I would want to see a sea change in the very way parties present themselves to the electorate, work out a coordinated business plan to replace the current Congressional goat rodeo, and pull the legislature and executive into organic partnership.
Which brings me to my concluding point.
It is refreshing and courageous that a distinguished law professor should take the 1787 model and its authors off their pedestal, and seek to popularize insights from the California-based masters of comparative politics (Arend Lijphart, Rein Taagepera, Matthew S. Shugart) and other authorities who have called on Congress to switch to PR. Ultimately, if a conversation does unfold, I think we need to sharpen our sense of what this institutional engineering would be expected to deliver, and acknowledge that what works well in New Zealand might work well in Colorado but not on the scale of the US as a whole. The price we pay for being a superpower with the largest economy, the third largest population and fourth largest landmass is that we wouldn’t get to enjoy the full benefits of being parliamentary in the way that a constitutional monarchy of five million would. But if the goal is just to ensure that civil war is the stuff of movies and not reality, then to paraphrase Stearns, we should not let the best be the enemy of the good enough.
Kieran Williams is a political scientist at Drake University, where he teaches courses on parliaments, European politics, and comparative election law.
