Evaluating Stearns' "Parliamentary America"

Stephen Griffin

For the Balkinization symposium on Maxwell Stearns, Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024).

Maxwell Stearns’ important book is part of a welcome surge of interest in fundamental political and constitutional reform.  It is a well-considered effort by a law professor to diagnose our current political situation and propose specific reforms.  Such efforts are all to the good.

As this symposium amply illustrates, lots of liberals are decidedly unhappy with the way our government works.  But anyone with a serious interest in reform faces hard choices.  For example, there are proposals that cannot be implemented without amending the Constitution (like Stearns’ three amendments).  Others require new legislation but not amendments, such as many proposed changes to voting rights and election law.  In addition, some reforms with substantial effects might be achieved simply by changing the internal rules by which Congress operates (such as abolishing the Senate filibuster).  With gridlock seemingly prevailing in Washington, knowing which path to take is not easy.

Stearns goes big by saying that amendments making substantial changes are the only way out, the “least radical means” of fixing our problems.  But what exactly are the problems his modified parliamentary system (see the other contributions to the symposium for the details) are meant to solve?  Stearns’ argument here has some distinctive features.  I will focus on the relationship between his diagnosis of the problem and the parliamentary solution. 

Stearns starts with an arresting observation – that the American system of government has not in fact served as a beacon of inspiration for the world.  Our specific presidential-federalist system has not been widely imitated among democracies (and when it has, things have not gone well).  Like many liberal academics who study the way our government operates, Stearns believes it has failed.  Further, like many who approach that study from political science, he argues the heart of the matter is the way the preferences of voters are channeled into options controlled by only two broad coalition parties which are then channeled further into seats by the system of representation in Congress.  As he notes, this final component of the system has not changed much since Congress embraced single-district representation in the nineteenth century and then froze the membership of the House of Representatives at 435 in 1929.

Despite this helpful starting observation, I wonder if the way Stearns organizes his argument makes it harder to appreciate.  He sees our political difficulties as being encoded in the presidential election cycle itself, rather than a product, say, of dysfunctional president-Congress interaction or some more general social malaise such as low trust in institutions.  As he sees it, the single-issue or ideological dynamic of presidential primaries is at sharp odds with the strategic-gather the coalition dynamic of the general election.  The committed voters who provide key support in the primaries are inevitably left frustrated by this dynamic and thus easy prey for opportunists like Trump who claim the general election was “stolen.”  A similar logic affects the Democratic party, with progressives being distinctly at odds with the way “their” presidents like Obama and Biden actually govern.

In considering Stearns’ argument, it’s useful to remind ourselves that untangling the causal origins of our current difficulties is not easy.  But it’s possible he makes this unnecessarily difficult.  He divides a crucial discussion between a chapter on the growing ideological divisions between the Democratic and Republicans parties and a chapter that is part of his “world tour” – showing what our two party system can learn from multiparty systems.  The specific systematic difficulty can be seen more easily once we recall the conventional wisdom when I was in school in the 1960s and 1970s.  During that now vanished political era, reforms like abolishing the Electoral College were opposed on the ground that this device helped preserve the two party system and it was that system that stabilized our politics and, really, the country.

Stearns follows the contemporary learning of political science that the stability of the system of my childhood was an artifact dependent on a multimodal distribution of policy preferences.  Once this changed to a bimodal distribution as it is now, the two party system became systematically unstable and unworkable as a means to advance policy goals.  My point is that appreciating the full force of this argument is made more difficult by his dividing the discussion into two distinct segments (this was suggested to me by Dean Chemerinsky’s comments as he appears to have missed this argument).

But hold on – how does a multiparty system promote stability given an existing bimodal distribution of political beliefs?  I think the idea is that the bimodal distribution is in part the product of two party dominance.  Allowing other parties to emerge by adopting a parliamentary system, expanding the House of Representatives and so on, will create a new political reality.  Stearns promotes this reform by saying that we have a third party problem with respect to presidential elections.  A perhaps better description is that we have a third candidate problem (think Ross Perot and Ralph Nader), since the organizational role of third parties, such as the Libertarian party, seems negligible across many elections.

This brings me to the main trouble I anticipate for Stearns’ advocacy of a multiparty system grounded in an empowered House.  Stearns seems to assume that when they are offered a place in the sun, third and fourth parties (he suggests the current Libertarian Party and a new Progressive party as examples) will become effective.  I’m not so optimistic.  I’m sure they will get candidates (that is virtually guaranteed by Stearns’ party list representation), but can they get the funding they need to compete in at least most of the states?  Stearns never mentions the issue of campaign financing.  But I don’t just mean that the new parties would have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars or more to compete successfully.  Isn’t there a damaging asymmetry built into Stearns’ amendments?  That is, third and fourth parties are rewarded in his new system of congressional elections.  But he doesn’t propose to change the structure of American federalism.  So, they are not rewarded at the state level, in which the status quo continues – two dominant parties working to keep third parties out.  If the Democratic and Republican parties continue to dominate at the state level this signals to campaign funders, I suggest, that the multiparty system is not viable.  Surely at a minimum, a the multiparty coalition in charge of the House will meet a hostile reception in state legislatures, a potential source of instability.

Stearns’ suggestions for how to structure a parliamentary democracy on top of our current arrangements are ingenious.  Among other points, his party list representation renders extreme gerrymandering pointless.  But absent evidence that his amendments are the only way out, how will he convince people?  It’s normal at this point to say something about the difficulty of amending the Constitution, but I believe we should put those particular concerns to one side when thinking seriously about the future of our government.  Historians have pointed out that the Constitution has been successfully amended in the past, even against great odds.  It’s not impossible, just politically difficult.

The real issue for me is that Stearns does not inspire confidence when he builds an argument for adopting his amendments by appealing to the political self-interest of the House members who will gain power (!).  In a democracy, after all, it is best to make arguments that appeal to popular opinion.  I’m not sure in the end that he has one – at least, I’m not sure he has a positive argument as opposed to a “sky is falling” negative argument.  With those reservations, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the cause of reform.