In situations where the powers of the executive and the legislature, any country that is considered to be stable enough democratically automatically adopts a constitution that requires it to be parliamentary. The United States is the only country that contravenes this ideology. The main characteristic of a parliamentary system is its fusion powers from both the legislature and the executive and is brought about by the fact that a government certainly needs the go-ahead of the majority in a legislative set up for it to retain power. This paper will examine why younger democracies adopt the presidential democracies whereas the mature democracies tend to thrive on the parliamentary system.
The advantages and disadvantages of these democratic systems as they compare to each other are as discussed below:
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In the presidential system, the government tends not to receive a lot of support from the legislature as there is no basis that can be used to measure the existence of such a majority within the system.
The legislature and the government tend to be at deadlock more often than not (Gerring, Thacker, & Moreno, 2009). Under the presidential system, the deadlock that emerges between the two sets of power could lead to conflict.
The presidential system does not provide enough incentives for political parties to come together and work with each other and also collaborate with the government (Dodd, 2015). This makes coalitions in presidential systems quite rare.
In a presidential democracy, the decision-making process is thought to be decentralized since, in most of the processes, the president simply accepts or disagrees with proposals that come from the legislative arm. Partisan strategies can be employed to influence the decisions of the legislature. As a result of this, the government has limited capability of influencing and implementing policies and hence, crises that comer with governability tend to occur less.
From the discussion above, it is clear that a presidential system is at more risk of authoritarianism than a parliamentary system (Verney, 2013). The observations drawn conclude that a country that is trying to be fully democratic in the long run should adopt a parliamentary system. For a fact, if a country has a per capita income whose range is less than $1500, it would be difficult for it to implement a parliamentary system. In a nutshell, a parliamentary system is good for a mature democracy whereas a presidential system is good for a young democracy.
References
Dodd, L. (2015). Coalitions in parliamentary government (Vol. 1247). Princeton University Press.
Gerring, J., Thacker, S. C., & Moreno, C. (2009). Are parliamentary systems better?. Comparative Political Studies , 42 (3), 327-359.
Verney, D. V. (2013). The analysis of political systems . Routledge.
