Political Institutions and Shutdown

When I was in graduate school the great presidentialism vs. parliamentarism debate was in full strength, with Latin Americanists at the forefront. Chile was often held up as a paradigmatic case (especially check out Linz and Valenzuela's 1994 edited volume). I particularly liked the debate because it connected political science to real policy options (even if in most cases not much changed!).

Notable in the current controversy over shutting down the federal government is the lack, and I mean total lack, of popular attention to political institutions. We hear a lot about leadership, ideology, stubbornness, acting like children, etc. but nobody outside political science stops to ask how political institutions create incentives. A presidential system with a division between the executive and legislative branches makes political actors act in a particular way based on who they believe they must answer to. Electoral systems dictate, among other things, how many parties will be represented in the legislature and to what degree they will form coalitions.

In the United States, as in many Latin American countries, there is little incentive for a) legislative coalition-building; and b) executive-legislative cooperation. In Latin America, both now and in the past, this can lead to coups. In the U.S., it leads to what we call "gridlock" and occasionally government shutdown. The rules of the game encourage political actors not to work together, and they scramble in different ways when the legislative and executive branches cannot get along.

All I want is for people to think about the rules of the political game. Even if you don't push to change them, at the very least recognize how they matter more than the stuff you read about in news stories. And think about how the rules of the game affect real people. Blame for the situation is collective--if we don't change the system, then we should realize that this will keep happening.