Criticism
Critics generally claim three basic disadvantages for presidential systems:
- Tendency towards authoritarianism — some political scientists say that presidentialism is not constitutionally stable.
- Political gridlock - The separation of powers of a presidential system establishes the presidency and the legislature as two parallel structures. Critics argue that this frequently creates undesirable and long-term political gridlock and political instability whenever the president and the legislative majority are from different parties, which is common because the electorate usually expects more rapid results from new policies than are possible. In addition, this reduces accountability by allowing the president and the legislature to shift blame to each other.
Read more about this topic: Presidential System
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“As far as criticism is concerned, we don’t resent that unless it is absolutely biased, as it is in most cases.”
—John Vorster (1915–1983)