Transcript: How Democrats Can Fix the Government in 2029 |
Transcript: How Democrats Can Fix the Government in 2029
Political scientists Lee Drutman and Mark Copelovitch say that the next time Democrats have a trifecta in Washington they must push proportional representation and other major reforms to America’s political system.
This is a lightly edited transcript of the May 13 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: We’re going to have a discussion that’s about democracy, but a little broader than the day-to-day news. And the guests are two political scientists. Lee Drutman is with the New America Foundation, and Mark Copelovitch is at the University of Wisconsin. Lee has done a lot of great work on parties and political reform, and Mark specializes in international political economy. He’s written about Europe and the political parties there, but also does some comparative work comparing what’s happening in the U.S. to what’s happening abroad. So guys, thank you. Welcome.
Mark Copelovitch: Thanks for having us.
Lee Drutman: Yeah. Excited to be having this conversation. Couldn’t be more timely.
Bacon: So I’m going to start with Mark, and I want to talk about—we’re going to define the problem first. And for a lot of New Republic listeners, the problem is the Republican Party—and I think that to some extent as well. But I think we want to get a little bit beyond this. One thing Mark talks about a lot on Bluesky—Mark has a great Bluesky feed, check him out there—is the problem of presidentialism. And explain to people—right now the presidency being a problem seems intuitive if you think about Donald Trump, maybe. But also Britain has a prime minister, and things are not going perfectly there right now either. So explain to me, from a political science perspective, why presidential systems are inherently problematic for democracies.
Copelovitch: Yes. My thoughts on this come from a classic article from Juan Linz, who was a scholar of Latin American politics and authoritarianism. He wrote an article back in the 1990s called The Perils of Presidentialism. And one of the core ideas of it is that presidential systems make it difficult to hold the executive accountable in ways that parliamentary systems don’t.
So you have the separation of powers, and in the U.S. we’re raised as Americans to believe that the branches of government and the separation of powers are good. But one of the things that Linz talked about with presidentialism is it makes it very difficult to remove the chief executive when laws are being broken, crimes are being committed, et cetera. And it creates dual and unresolvable claims to legitimacy.
So if you think about a parliamentary system, you vote—it’s usually proportional representation of some form. The prime minister is within the parliament, and this is what we’re seeing in Britain right now: the main party in government can remove the prime minister.
There can be a vote of confidence, which is usually a simple majority vote, where the coalition says, We no longer support the prime minister, and either there are new elections or you choose a new prime minister. It happens very quickly, and as we’ve seen in Britain, it can happen often—and it can happen for any number of reasons.
The problem in the U.S.—what we’re seeing with Trump—is the only mechanism for removing a president is either the next election or an extraordinary measure that the founders created called impeachment, which has never been successfully used in the entire history of the United States government. And when you directly elect a president, you have these dual claims of loyalty.
In a parliamentary system, you can claim the parliament represents the will of the people, and the prime minister is the leader of the government, but people voted for parties in parliament. When you have a presidential system, people vote for the parliament, but they also directly vote for the president. So the president—and you see this with far-right and nationalist and populist leaders often—they’re representing the people more authentically than the legislature.
So those are the core insights from Linz. And I study international relations and comparative politics, and I think that a lot of what we’re seeing in the United States is the problem of having a presidential system. And even more than that, in the United States, both parties since World War II have really delegated more and more power from Congress to the president, so you have governance by executive order. And we currently really don’t have a functioning Congress. We have extreme presidentialism right now, and the problem of a seeming inability to remove a leader who clearly is breaking the law and violating the Constitution.
Bacon: So Lee, I’m going to ask about the problem you write about a lot, which is—you’ve used this phrase, “the two-party doom loop.” So the question I’m going to ask you is: is a two-party system inherently problematic, or is the way the U.S.’ two-party system has evolved particularly problematic?
Drutman: The way that the U.S. two-party system has evolved is particularly problematic. Now, it’s interesting—Linz wrote that article, “Perils of Presidentialism,” in 1990, and in that article he struggles with the U.S., because he says the U.S. is actually a presidential system and it’s pretty stable. And he says the reason the U.S. is stable as a presidential system is because you have two parties that are basically centrist. So there’s not any real contestation over the direction of policy in the U.S., so you can have a presidential system with a two-party system that is very center-oriented, and that’s probably okay.
Now, it’s interesting—if we talk about presidentialism and PR, there are a lot of Latin American countries that have actually done this pretty successfully for the last three decades. Linz is writing in 1990. Scott Mainwaring, who’s an esteemed comparativist, writes an article in 1993 saying multipartyism and presidentialism is the difficult combination.
Now, interestingly, Scott Mainwaring and I wrote a piece a few years ago in which we looked at the evidence for the last 30 years of Latin American PR plus presidentialism, and Scott changed his views. He actually—PR and presidentialism can work okay under certain conditions. A number of Latin American countries have actually worked reasonably well. And we talk a lot about the decline of democracy, but actually there are a number of pretty successful cases in Latin America over the last 30 years.
So during this period, the U.S. two-party system, which had been very center-oriented for a long time, starts to pull apart. Now, I actually think the way to think about that pulling apart is a collapse of dimensionality—that what we had in the U.S., though we called it a two-party system, was really a multi-party system that was within the two-party system. We had liberal Democrats and conservative Democrats. We had liberal Republicans and conservative Republicans. So something more akin to a four-party system in which you could make different coalitions across different issues. And we divided government for a long time, which was coalition government.
Starting in the 1990s, what happens is the collapse of dimensionality and the pulling apart of those two-party coalitions—a lot of reasons for that, that we could go into. But basically, the problem is that you can maintain a two-party system when the two parties are broadly overlapping and there’s not a real difference between which party gets into power. But as the parties pull apart and elections become narrow and existential and zero-sum, that system breaks down.
A fundamental principle of democracy is that it’s a system in which parties can lose elections. And if you feel like you’re going to have another chance in power someday, and the rules are not going to totally change and shut you out of power if you lose, or your vision of the country is not going to be fundamentally upset if you’re out of power—then it’s an okay system.
If you think that if you lose everything, and the other side is going to try to permanently oppress you—which is what so many people seem to believe in this country, and there’s some evidence to suggest that the current party in power is trying to do that—that makes it hard to have a democracy. You have to believe in the legitimacy of elections. And when that breaks apart, you don’t have a democracy anymore. And that’s the situation that we’re in.
So can a two-party system work? Yes, under certain narrow conditions. However, there was a lot that was left out in that bipartisan compromise. In the 1950s, a lot of political scientists are writing about how the two-party system is just a muddle, and that a lot of the issues that America needs to be dealing with—civil rights, a very important issue—is pushed to the side in order to maintain that bipartisan compromise. And arguably, it is the elevation of voting rights and civil rights in the 1960s that starts to break apart that compromise and create a slow sorting.
It almost feels like in a two-party system, you can either have a broad bipartisan compromise that leaves a lot of people out, or you can have a two-party competition which just creates an existential power struggle—neither of which is great. One of which doesn’t lead to violence at a national level, or leads to subnational violence—you create a lot of subnational authoritarianism in the U.S.
Bacon: So let me zone in on what you’ve written about as the solution, Lee. You’ve written about proportional representation and the idea of multi-member districts. Explain to people what that means specifically.
So I live in Kentucky—just break it down. I live in Kentucky. We have six members of Congress. They’re dispersed around the state—there’s one in Louisville, there’s one in Lexington, and four in the other parts of the state. So we have six members of Congress in our current system: five Republicans and one Democrat. Explain how proportional representation and multi-member districts would look from that perspective.
Drutman: And what percentage of Kentucky voted for Kamala Harris in the last election?
Bacon: Let’s say it’s 35 Harris, 65 Trump. Something like that.
Drutman: Yeah. Okay. So Kentucky would be roughly two-thirds Republican, one-third Democrat. So in a proportional system, that would be two Democrats and four Republicans. But because of the way that the district lines are drawn, Democrats are all pushed into one district, more or less—one safe district for Democrats and five safe districts for Republicans.
Now, what makes that possible? The fact that there are a bunch of different lines that you can draw. Now, imagine an alternative world—perhaps our future—in which Kentucky is just one six-member district. Everybody votes in the same election as you do for Senate, and parties put forward lists of candidates. So Republicans put forward a list of candidates, Democrats put forward a list of candidates. Democrats get 33 percent of the seats—the two most popular Democratic candidates on that list go to Congress. Republicans put forward a list of candidates—the four most popular Republicans go to Congress.
So that’s proportional. That’s what we think of as fairness. You don’t have to draw any district lines, and candidates run on party lists, and parties get representation in Congress in proportion to the share of votes that they get—which is a very intuitive sense of fairness.
And in some ways, it’s the simpler system. When we think of single-member districts as simple, it’s really incredibly complicated the way all these lines constantly get redrawn. And what it also means is that all the votes matter. You get to vote for candidates that are going to go to Congress, so you’re actually helping to elect somebody who represents you.
And maybe there’s actually more than two parties, because there are probably two or three Democratic parties and two or three Republican parties that could run candidates. So rather than having these fights that we’re having within Democratic primaries, or Republicans having within their own primaries—progressives should be their own party. They should be able to run separately from the more classical liberal Democrats, the more business Democrats. Maybe some populist Democrats might run in a separate party.
And they can come together and form a coalition as the Democratic coalition. But right now, I think a lot of people don’t know what the Democratic Party stands for, or who the Democratic Party is. They have ideas of what the Democratic Party should be, but they can’t really vote for those candidates who really reflect their idea of what the Democratic coalition should be.
Whereas if you had a proportional system where, instead of needing to get 51 percent, in a six-member district roughly 16 percent—that would allow two different types of Democrats, or the Democratic coalition, and it would allow different types of Republicans. There are some more moderate, traditional liberal Republicans who don’t have any representation in Congress. I don’t know how many of them are left in Kentucky, but I think there is still some portion of the electorate that is non-MAGA but Republican—doesn’t like the direction of the Republican Party, not Democrats—but might support a more classical Republican Party.
Bacon: Let me ask. Okay—Italy, France, Israel—there are countries that have multi-party systems and, I think, proportional representation, and they’re not all governed perfectly. Why is this inherently better than our current two-party doom loop? Is more parties necessarily better?
Drutman: It is, up to a limit. Now, France is a presidential—well—presidential system. So to Mark’s point about presidentialism. Also, France is not a proportional system. It is a majoritarian, single-member-district system. They use a two-round system which allows for multiple parties.
Bacon: Oh, yes. Sorry.
Drutman: But yes, they have multiple parties. Italy—somehow they muddle through. The Italians have an........