Thirty years ago, a political scientist named Juan Linz wrote a series of influential essays articulating a link between presidencies and democratic backsliding, including by coup. In contrast to parliamentary systems, where legislators choose the chief executive (usually called a prime minister), presidential systems produce rival centers of power and reduce incentives for compromise, Linz argued. When the legislature and the president can each claim an electoral mandate, intractable differences might tempt one or the other to "knock on the barracks door" in search of military allies; a violent dissolution of democracy could be the result. Parliamentarianism, by contrast, provides a safety valve because the legislature has the ability to remove the executive, typically by simple majority vote. Even when things don't get to the stage of full meltdown, presidencies tend to heighten tensions in polarized societies, Linz contended, encouraging extreme political views rather than compromise, and often producing political gridlock.
Did Donald Trump prove him right?
A professor at Yale who died in 2013, Linz wrote in an era not long after conflicts between presidents and legislatures had preceded military coups in Chile, Brazil and other Latin American countries, leading to brutal dictatorships. Scholars have debated the theory ever since, and, while Linz may have painted with an overly broad brush at times, his arguments hold up better than most middle-aged theories in political science.
The United States, with its long-lived presidential system, always posed a challenge for Linz. But the events of this month - in which a defeated president reluctant to leave office roused a mob that then attacked the national legislature - were precisely the kind of conflict he worried about. And there are many other echoes of Trump in Linz's writings, which argue that the powerful presidency attracts a strongman personality who "will always find it hard to reconcile himself to being out of power for good."
The United States may have avoided the worst possible outcome for a presidency, but other Linzian observations have fresh relevance today. He made the case that since you can run for president without climbing your way up a party ladder - unlike vying to be prime minister - the office appeals to outsider candidates with no allegiance to the political system, who can gain popularity by railing against that system, diminishing trust in it. Presidents are inclined to insist that they and not the fragmented legislature speak for "the people," as a way of aggrandizing their power. (Trump's "silent majority" and "real America" rhetoric fits this pattern.) At the same time, they have less incentive than a legislature to represent the interests of the minority party or parties. Unlike in a parliamentary system, there is no penalty for appointing toadies and hyperpartisan hacks to the Cabinet.
