The United States Capitol Building. Flickr/www.GlynLowe.com. Some rights reserved.
The US presidential system has been much heralded for its system of checks and balances. But Trump’s victory has given rise to a number of questions about the future of US democracy and world politics. The most important of these questions is arguably this: what checks and balances in the US political system will Trump face during his presidency? Based purely on the institutional setup of the US presidential system, how much damage can Trump cause? The answer, unfortunately, is quite a bit.
For a long time, the US presidential system has been regarded as a textbook example of horizontal accountability (i.e. accountability between government institutions) for its famous system of checks and balances [1]. A standard question in introductory courses to Comparative Politics asks students to assess “who is more powerful: the US President or the UK Prime Minister?”. Students are expected to distinguish the international from the domestic sphere, and to discuss how the US President is seen as more powerful in the international arena, while the UK Prime Minister has greater because less constraint in domestic politics. Elements in the institutional design of the US political system that ensure more checks and balances than that of the UK include:
