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James Q. Wilson claims that Roosevelt, during the Great Depression, and Lyndon Johnson, when he commanded majorities in both houses of Congress,...

In the context of this question, the important difference between a parliamentary government and our presidential system is the degree of unity that exists between the chief executive and the majority in the legislature.  In our system, the president and the Congress are often at odds with one another.  This does not happen in the parliamentary system because the chief executive (often called the prime minister) is the leader of the majority in the legislature.


In a parliamentary system, each party selects its own leader.  This is done by party bosses, not by elections.  The parties then compete in elections and the leader of the winning party (this is somewhat oversimplified) becomes the chief executive.  This means that the chief executive’s party always has a majority in the legislature and the chief executive is always someone that the members of that party in the legislature have picked themselves.  In addition, the chief executive gets to pick which members of the legislature will get important jobs in the government.  All of this adds up to a situation in which the chief executive has a great deal of power and is pretty much assured that any proposal he or she puts forward will pass.


This is very different in our system.  We can, as we do now, have the president be from a different party than the majority in one or both houses of Congress.  Even when the president and the majorities in Congress are from the same party, the Congress does not “owe” the president anything.  They did not pick the president.  The president has little power to reward or punish them.  In addition, the president might not even be from the same ideological faction in the party.  For example, if Donald Trump is elected president, he might find himself opposed by a more conservative (as opposed to populist) Republican faction in Congress led by Paul Ryan.  When John F. Kennedy was in office, he was much more liberal than many of the Democrats in Congress and had a hard time getting his proposals approved by Congress.


What Wilson is saying is that Roosevelt and Johnson were lucky enough to be in situations where they had the support of a majority in Congress.  They did not literally have the powers that prime ministers have.  However, they were both in the same ideological faction of their party as the majority in Congress.  This means that the majority in Congress had roughly the same interests as the two presidents and had no reason to oppose them.  Therefore, these presidents did not face the same difficulties that other presidents have in passing their agendas. 


Presidents cannot act as leaders of a parliamentary system just because they want to.  They have no formal power to do so.  They can only act in this way if they are lucky enough to be in office when Congress is made up of people who agree with them.

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