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Article Excerpt
The United States has fallen well behind worldwide trends in presidential elections. Its electoral college regionalizes the contest for the national executive, contrary to a worldwide trend toward direct election. U.S. states continue to select presidential electors via plurality rule. resulting in vulnerability to third-party "spoilers," even at a time when third-party voting is on the upswing. The worldwide trend is toward runoffs to guard against spoilers. Only in nomination methods is the United States the trendsetter, as primary elections only recently have been adopted in other countries, mainly in Latin America. Yet the American regionalized and sequential nomination process contrasts with the national primaries preferred elsewhere.
The United States was the first country to have a chief executive selected through an electoral process distinct from the election of legislators. Despite the absence to this date of a constitutional mandate for states to hold popular elections for presidential electors, by early in the nineteenth century nearly all states did so. In the two centuries since, many more countries have implemented popular elections for a president. France in 1848 was probably the next example, although French presidential elections soon thereafter became indirect again until 1965. In the second half of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, nearly all countries of Latin America established popular presidential elections, and in more recent decades the number of countries with such elections has grown immensely.
The United States may have started the trend toward popular presidential election, but in more recent times it has fallen behind worldwide trends in the methods by which those elections are conducted. The United States has continued to use its electoral college, while elsewhere the trend has been unmistakably toward methods that are not only popular (voters allowed to vote for presidential candidates) but direct (popular voting is decisive and final). Indirect methods raise the possibility that one candidate could win the popular vote yet not be selected president, as happened in 2000 in the United States. In the world today, the only other country in which such an outcome could occur is Bolivia.
In addition to the trend toward direct election, there is also a trend in the decision rules away from the plurality method, because of that method's vulnerability to so-called spoilers. A spoiler is a candidate with no realistic chance of winning the election outright, but whose presence in the race may affect which of the other candidates does win, by siphoning votes disproportionately from one of those other candidates. To guard against spoilers, while simultaneously permitting a wide range of partisan options to participate in the campaign for president, more and more countries are adopting runoff procedures. The U.S. use of an electoral college, in which the electors are chosen by plurality (usually statewide) stands against these two trends.
In a third trend, on the other hand, the United States has been the pacesetter. More and more countries are joining the United States by using primary elections to select parties' presidential nominees. Interestingly, however, even in this one area where the United States is ahead of the curve in presidential selection methods, it still retains features not found elsewhere that mirror the general-election process. First, primaries are indirect, whereby voters select party convention delegates rather than decisively determine the nominee. Second, like the electoral college, primaries take place on a state-by-state basis--in this case, spread out over time rather than on a single date. No country in the world uses a similar set of rules in its primary elections.
Before turning to the variety of election methods used elsewhere in the world, and how U.S. methods compare, let us first turn to some theoretical considerations regarding executive elections. To do so, we need to consider variations in the nature of the office being elected, as not all popularly elected presidencies are clear analogues to the U.S. presidency within their respective political systems. We also need to ask ourselves, what is the purpose of having an elected national executive, particularly in a federal system, with all the emphasis such systems put on preserving the (constitutionally delimited) sovereignty of sub-national governments?
Types of Presidencies
In parliamentary systems, the head of government depends on the majority in parliament to obtain and maintain power, and the head of state may be a hereditary monarch or a largely ceremonial president, often selected by parliament and rarely by popular election. In what I shall term "pure" presidential systems, on the other hand, the roles of head of state and head of government are combined into one office selected separately from the legislature. Thus, executive power does not depend on the composition of the legislature, and may even be held by a party opposed to the legislative majority--a possibility, conventionally known as "divided government" in the United States, that is ruled out in parliamentary systems.
However, not all countries that hold presidential elections can be considered pure presidential systems (Shugart and Carey 1992). In the Fifth Republic of France, for example, there is an elected presidency in the role of head of state, but there is also a prime minister who heads the government and is accountable to the majority in the National Assembly, just as in parliamentary systems. In France, then, the possibility of a head of government opposed by the legislative majority is ruled out, but the possibility of a president and prime minister of different parties--known as "cohabitation"--is a very real possibility, and has been common since first occurring in 1986. The French president is, of course, no mere ceremonial figure, but rather is a major partisan player in French politics, and has the right to dissolve parliament and call new elections (once per year at most), among other powers.
Thus, whether in the form of pure presidentialism as in the United States or the hybrid form seen in France, the presence of popular election for a non-ceremonial presidency raises the possibility that the president and the legislative majority may be of different political tendencies. In fact, that is one of the principal theoretical justifications for having a presidency in the first place. Legislatures may be fragmented by multiple political parties, as in France, for example, or by regional divisions, as in many federal systems, including the United States. The presidency in such a context may serve to counter the fragmentation of legislative elections by creating a single national office whose occupant is chosen by the people. Some political scientists see the separation of the elected executive from other sources of authority in the polity as a potential advantage (for a review, see Shugart and Carey 1992), while others see it as fraught with perils that endanger effective governance or even democracy itself (Linz 1994). I shall not enter into this debate here. Rather, my purpose is to note that this idea of the chief executive being distinct from the legislative parties and the states of a federation implies that the president is the people's agent in the government formation and policy-making processes.
If the purpose of executive election is to counter the potentially disaggregating effects of legislative and sub-national competition, then it follows that presidential selection processes should be bipolarizing and nationalizing. By bipolarizing, I mean an electoral process that encourages high "identifiability" of executive choice (Strom 1990; Huber and Powell 1994; Shugart 2001). Unlike a legislature, particularly one elected by proportional representation, a presidency is almost always held by a single person, (1) and thus is an indivisible prize, and is elected to a fixed term. There is only one president at a time, and his or her term of office is constitutionally established, rather than subject to changes in the balance of power in the legislature. Thus, it is probably desirable that the election process promote broad popular support for the president's election, ideally a majority. It is probably also desirable that the election process produce two major alternatives, to clarify choices for voters and thus enhance identifiability. The bipolarization of presidential elections may even reshape a fragmented legislative party system into two blocs, as in France after the initiation of direct presidential elections in 1965 (Duverger 1986, 80-82). Several more recently established democracies have emulated the French model of direct elections of the presidency as a counterweight to legislative fragmentation, including Portugal after 1976 and Poland after 1990.
The second criterion that promotes the presidency as a counterweight to the disaggregating tendencies that sometimes result from legislative elections and especially from federalism is nationalization. For instance, legislative elections under some electoral systems tend to focus competition around local issues or legislators' personal attention to constituents, which may inhibit the articulation of broader national issues in legislative elections. This effect is often magnified in federal systems including the United States. The national election of a chief executive is a potential counter to such localizing effects because it generates competition around large national issues such as the economy and national security. If the nationalization of competition for the presidency is a desirable feature, then it is probably also desirable for presidential elections to be conducted in such a way as to promote articulation of national issues rather than local concerns.
It is worth noting that it is a normative statement to claim that bipolarization and nationalization are desirable features of presidential elections. It is just as plausible to construct an alternative argument that limiting bipolarizing and nationalizing tendencies is desirable. In a multiparty system with a diverse ideological spectrum, it may be argued that it is advantageous to encourage the president to have support in the legislative parry system to attain or retain office. Thus, ratification by the legislature may be a requirement for gaining the office, or a legislative majority may be empowered to remove the elected executive and call new elections. Few countries have followed such 'procedures, although Bolivia currently requires and Chile formerly required legislative assent for a president to take office (except in the rare case of a popular vote majority), while Finland formerly used an electoral college in which representatives of its many political parties assembled to elect the president. Israel briefly provided for a directly elected prime minister who needed to maintain parliamentary confidence, thus bypassing the fragmented parliament in the selection of the head of government, but requiring that the prime minister have partisan support to remain in office.
Similarly, in a regionally diverse federation, it may be desirable to ensure that presidents do not overlook those very regional differences, and hence the election process may be designed to ensure that local preferences are injected into the selection of the executive. Few countries have gone this route, although it does provide a normative justification for the electoral college in the United States (Best 1975), (2) and formerly in Argentina. Without settling these normative debates--which really have no right or wrong answer--I would simply observe two points. First, the logic of injecting legislators or sub-national interests into executive selection or retention of office is a distinctly "counter-presidentialist" argument, in that it seeks to restrain the inherent tendency...
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