America's Constitution: How Exceptional Compared to Others?

The story of how formal amendment, judicial interpretations, and political practices have changed the constitutional rules in the United States will be told in more detail throughout this text. Having pointed out the various ways that the constitutional rules can and do change over the course of history should not detract, however, from the basic point about the degree to which the Constitution created a system of government that is quite exceptional when compared to other countries that might legitimately be called democracies. What is most exceptional about the American system of government that the Constitution shaped is the degree to which government authority and responsibilities are fragmented.¹ One can see this fragmentation when comparing our constitutional design to that of other countries.

First, the Constitution of 1787 created a system of separation of powers and checks and balances that is remarkably different from the parliamentary systems that characterize all of the other rich democracies. In our system, executive, legislative, judicial power is not only lodged in different institutions, but each institution is given tools both to influence the other branches and to protect itself from the encroachments of the others. There is no separation of executive and legislative power in parliamentary systems. In these systems, the prime minister is elected by the majority in the parliament and his/her cabinet (the heads of the executive branch departments) must be approved by parliament as well. In parliamentary systems, that is to say, executive and legislative powers are fused. In the United States, executive and legislative institutions were created at birth to live in conflict, with gridlock an ever-present possibility. In some parliamentary systems such as Great Britain and Finland, moreover, the judiciary is not co-equal to the other branches, as it is in the United States, lacking the power to over-rule parliamentary or cabinet action as unconstitutional (though this judicial power exits in such parliamentary systems as India, Germany, France and Japan).

Some countries with parliamentary systems, namely those without a monarchy, elect a president, as we do in the United States. But, with the exception of the French presidency, they tend to fill the kinds of ceremonial roles that kings and queens do-christening new warships, opening parliament, greeting foreign dignitaries, and the like-- without much independent power to shape national affairs. This is true, for example, in Germany and Israel.

Other countries have constitutions that created a system of separated powers-rather than a parliamentary system--but with not much in the way of checks and balances. The handful of democracies in Latin America, for example, have separately elected presidents and national legislatures or Congresses, but in most of them, the president has considerable power over Congress because of emergency decree powers, and can often remove judges without seriously consulting Congress.²

Our Constitution further fragments government power by dividing the legislative power among two powerful and relatively independent chambers, each of which has somewhat independent responsibilities and constituencies, and relatively equal power in the legislative process. Though many parliamentary systems are bi-cameral in law, almost none (with the exception of Germany) are bi-cameral in fact. In these systems, the lower house has gained power over the legislative process (the House of Commons in Great Britain, the Knesset in Israel, the Diet in Japan), with the upper house becoming either entirely irrelevant or weak and easily circumvented.

The Constitution of 1787 also fragments power by creating a federal system, with powers and responsibilities distributed among the states and national government. To be sure, other countries, including Germany, India, and Brazil, have federal systems-a subject that will be explored in depth in Chapter 3-but the American states are unusually influential in national affairs because they are represented in an upper house in the national government that exercises real power (the Senate). Moreover, the states play an important role in the election of the president because of the state-based electoral college created by the Framers, a way of electing the chief executive that exists nowhere else (to be described in more detail in Chapter 10).

While other countries, then, share bits and pieces of American constitutional design, ours is the only one that builds in fragmentation in so many ways. It is one of the reasons why American politics and government policy making are so often grid-locked and incoherent. It is, as we have suggested in this chapter, exactly what most of the Framers had in mind.

²Seymour Martin Lipset and Jason M. Lakin, The Democratic Century (Norman, OK: the University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), ch. 2.

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