Obama has won.

The question of reforming the US electoral and legislative systems remains In the end, Barack Obama gathered everyone in his thrall, delivering a lesson in leadership with his victory speech. Yet, you have to wonder how things change. Every leap year, November would be a month of particularly dangerous enticements. The American presidential elections would roll along, and by the time the vote was counted to determine the victor, vast swathes of the rest of the world would be in the throes of wannabe hysteria. If we too had primaries, our fray of candidates would be refreshed. If wed adopt the presidential system, our government would be more purposive in its decision-making. If we would just run key executive appointments by the Upper House of the legislature, as the Americans do at the Senate, how much more accountable and deliberative our democracy would be. If only! However, at the end of this four-year presidential cycle, notice the glaring scarcity of such wishlists. It is not that there has proved to be anything inherently different in the architecture of separation of powers in the United States. Instead, four years of viciously partisan politics that is threatening that country with the so-called fiscal cliff, even as its peculiar electoral college mechanism has led to the spectacle of presidential candidates focusing on swing states almost to the exclusion of all the others, have not just baffled us foreigners, they have also provoked much comment that parts of Americas electoral system urgently need fixing. So, welcome United States of America to the biggest sport in the democratic world: scouting around on foreign shores for tips on electoral and institutional reform. One of the most thoughtfully critiqued in fact, for the most part applauded books in the US this campaign season is Its Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism. And if its authors had their way, theyd have the country throw off the yoke of its particular form of separation of powers and import attributes of parliamentary democracy wholesale. Obviously aware of the impossibility of that objective, they settle for bits and pieces of reform, anything to get the system working for the greater common good and to revive public confidence. And their argument is worth a careful hearing as politics-as-business-as-usual exasperates more and more voters worldwide leading to episodic confrontations ranging from the Yellow/ Red Shirts in Bangkok and Occupy Wall Street in New York, to the Jantar Mantar sit-ins in Delhi. The authors profiles are an obvious testament to that now imperilled marker of American democratic exceptionalism: bipartisanship. Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein are

think-tankers from the left and right of centre, but as they paint a grim picture of the legislative gridlock in the US Congress, they unequivocally call out the take-nohostages strategy of the Republican Party in its Tea Party-driven zealousness to settle the issue of what the size of government should be and to cast doubts on Barack Obamas legitimate claim to the office of president. For the second half of Obamas term, Republicans had a majority in the House of Representatives and enough numbers in the Senate to filibuster merely as a means to obstruct. Their refusal to reach out and, yet more importantly, to let themselves be reached out to across the aisle provides the backdrop to the anxiety that informs a reading of the election results just in, with Republicans retaining the House. Or, as Mann and Ornstein frame the problem: (It) is the serious mismatch between the political parties, which have become as vehemently adversarial as parliamentary parties, and a governing system that, unlike a parliamentary democracy, makes it extremely difficult for majorities to act. The problem, they say, is past quick-fixes. It wont simply sort itself out with time, nor with simplistic measures like public financing of elections or imposition of term limits on members of the legislature. Equally, they concede the untenability of their solution of choice addressing the problems posed by the USs increasingly parliamentary-style parties adopting a Westminster system. Neither the American people nor their political class can be expected to brace themselves for the root-and-branch restructuring of the American Constitution this would require. So Mann and Ornstein suggest incremental reform. They look to the Australian example, and report the supposed merits of mandatory voting in order to increase the turnout and thereby to rescue political parties from hijack by ideological extremes. They strive to recommend a parliamentary-style majority in the legislature to support the executive by asking that the US abandon the practice of electing members of Congress midway through a presidents term to improve the fit between (its) current parliamentary-style parties and the policymaking process. They call for limits on the exercise of the filibuster and a speeding up of the confirmation process in the Senate for presidential nominees. They demand that reporters fact-check political rhetoric real-time and abandon he-said-she-said reporting. And so on, even as they grant the counter-arguments to these suggestions, and the resistance they are likely to meet. The point of running through these suggestions is not to advocate their adoption or consideration of Mann and Ornsteins proposals to the exclusion of all others. In fact, as we in India scan the growingly more frequent deadlocks in our multi-party legislatures, in

the states and at the Centre, this summing-up is to ask what may be the most constructive manner in which we as individual voters can set in process deliberation on reform or simply, re-energisation of legislatures and electoral procedures. Addressing its first sitting on December 9, 1946 as its provisional chairperson, Sachchidananda Sinha told Indias Constituent Assembly: I have no doubt that you will also, in the nature of things, pay in the course of your work greater attention to the provisions of the American Constitution than to those of any other. It is arguable how influential, comparatively, the American document was in the end in the drafting of our Constitution. But as the US thinks through the hiccups in the working of its constitutionally mandated separation of powers, the process by which debate and possibly action are fostered could certainly be illuminating for us here, in another time and another context. The solutions necessarily will be our own.