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Full Description
Can a parliamentary democracy end America's constitutional crisis?
Winner of the IPPY Book Award for Current Events I: Political, Economic, and Foreign Affairs
Americans face increasingly stark choices each presidential election and a growing sense that our government can't solve the nation's most urgent challenges. Our eighteenth-century system is ill suited to our twenty-first-century world. Information-age technology has undermined our capacity to face common problems together and turned our democracy upside down, with gerrymanders letting representatives choose voters rather than voters choosing them. In Parliamentary America, Maxwell L. Stearns argues that the solution to these complex problems is a parliamentary democracy.
Stearns considers such leading alternatives as ranked choice voting, the national popular vote, and congressional term limits, showing why these can't solve our constitutional crisis. Instead, three amendments—expanding the House of Representatives, having House party coalitions choose the president, and letting the House end a failing presidency based on no confidence—will produce a robust multiparty democracy. These amendments hold an essential advantage over other proposals: by leaving every member of the House and Senate as incumbents in their districts or states, the amendments provide a pressure-release valve against reforms threatening that status.
Stearns takes readers on a world tour—England, France, Germany, Israel, Taiwan, Brazil, and Venezuela—showing what works in government, what doesn't, and how to make the best features our own. Genuine party competition and governing coalitions, commonplace across the globe, may seem like a fantasy in the United States. But we can make them a reality. This rare book offers an optimistic vision, explaining in accessible terms how to transform our troubled democracy into a thriving parliamentary America.
Contents
Introduction. Happier Birthdays, Better Parties
Part I. How We Got Here
Chapter 1. The Third Constitutional Crisis
Chapter 2. The Third-Party Dilemma
Chapter 3. Constitutional Gridlock: How a System We Managed for Two Centuries Suddenly Went off the Rails
Chapter 4. The End of Trust: Experts, the Government, and the Media
Part II. The World Tour
Chapter 5. The European Tour: England, France, and Germany
Chapter 6. Democratic Variations: Israel, Taiwan, Brazil, and Venezuela
Part III. Three Amendments That Will Fix Our Broken System
Chapter 7. Reinventing the House of Representatives: More Voices, More Parties, More Power
Chapter 8. Reinventing Presidential Elections: The Art of Coalition Politics
Chapter 9. Reinventing Presidential Removal: How "No Confidence" Instills Confidence
Part IV. The Politics of Ratification and Envisioning Parliamentary America
Chapter 10. Achieving Coalition Governance: The Politics of Passing These Amendments
Chapter 11. Parliamentary America: Toward Better Politics, Further Reforms, and a Civil Society
Conclusion. From "We the People" to "We the Framers"
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
Index
