> Under this theory, whenever all branches of government, executive and legislative, are held by a single party, we expect the policy to be coherent and the governance solid
No we shouldn’t. Dominance of a single party will prevent inter-party fighting/fingerpointing/blame-shifting, but their intra-party equivalents can be just as bad. This is especially the case given the US has very weak party discipline by global standards, the party leadership has rather limited powers to tell the party’s elected officials what to do
In a parliamentary system, the executive needs to actively retain the confidence of the legislature, since a bare majority of the legislature can fire the executive at any time for any reason (and in a bicameral system, generally just a bare majority of the lower house). In a presidential system, the executive is an independent power base, separately elected, and the legislature can only remove it on the basis of serious misconduct (and often needs a supermajority to do so)
No we shouldn’t. Dominance of a single party will prevent inter-party fighting/fingerpointing/blame-shifting, but their intra-party equivalents can be just as bad. This is especially the case given the US has very weak party discipline by global standards, the party leadership has rather limited powers to tell the party’s elected officials what to do
In a parliamentary system, the executive needs to actively retain the confidence of the legislature, since a bare majority of the legislature can fire the executive at any time for any reason (and in a bicameral system, generally just a bare majority of the lower house). In a presidential system, the executive is an independent power base, separately elected, and the legislature can only remove it on the basis of serious misconduct (and often needs a supermajority to do so)