The Important Thing for a Government

I'm currently reading an article by Professor Bruce Ackerman in which he argues against American-style separation of powers as a system that other governments should copy. He gives various reasons why presidentialism is bad: it creates impasses (like the one we're in now), gives perverse incentives to majorities that do take full control of the government, encourages the President to overthrow the legislature, promotes the cult of Presidential personality, etc. He also argues, however, that the Westminster system, where a single electoral victory grants plenary power for up to five years, is wrong, because citizens have better things to do than debate issues in the public forum all the time and so a single election should not be interpreted as a sweeping mandate to do whatever you want. I'm not yet to the point where he proposes his own solutions, though I think I have some ideas what they are and I think I don't like them, but just from what I've read so far I think I think that he fundamentally misunderstands something about governments. Because, after all, Ackerman concedes that the American and British systems appear to work quite well indeed for America and Britain. So what is it that makes these hideous systems manage to work well in their indigenous nations?

The answer is that the most important trait a government can have actually has nothing to do with the structure of that government, or at least not in any particularly predictable way. The most important thing for a government is the popular perception of legitimacy. The citizenry must accept and believe that the government is truly the government of them, by them, and for them. We believe that in America. They believe that in Britain. So our governments work. That's why, I think, the American hyper-inert system has actually tended to produce results, even when government is divided (though the filibuster is undermining this tradition), and the British government has not tended to produce massive overreaches by fleeting majorities. The culture of legitimacy shapes the government into a working, functioning whole.

The problem with this answer, of course, is that there's no easy way to create the perception of legitimacy in a brand-new government. I think my best recommendation would be to avoid talk of "copying" the systems of prominent countries. When the people of a nation sit down to forge a new constitution for themselves, I think foreign scholars should stay away. The drafters of that new constitution should of course be learned in political theory and constitutional design, but the answers to the basic questions of governmental structure, like "how many elections should a movement need to win before it can shape policy?", should be answered by the people of that country. In America, where we set out to craft the largest and most diverse democratically-governed nation in history, we needed a system with heavy insulation against domination by, say, either slave states or free states. Britain's a smaller, more homogeneous country, and as their system developed ad hoc the House of Commons became seen as the people's representatives against the king or the Lords. So for a nation that is just designing its own constitution, I advise it to ignore advice and make its own road in the way that suits it best.

If I did have one concrete piece of advice, it would be to clearly delineate the means of constitutional change. Both the British and American systems have been required by circumstances to change over time. In America, we have almost steadily increased the power of our central government; Britain, meanwhile, is in the process of delegating more power to Scottish, Welsh, and North Irish regional governments. Even if the original constitution is perfectly adapted to that country at that time, it is impossible that it will continue to be so well-suited forever. Ackerman worries that in Presidential governments the President might just dissolve the legislature and rule as a dictator, with military support. Well, if the military wants to run a military coup it is likely to have one. At the very least I think you can have a well-defined process for changing the institutional structure, so that the people can at the very least have a clear idea of whether that change was legitimate or not.