Winds of Change (via Instapundit), like many others, has noticed the ideological division in many countries that has resulted in complete impasse — the latest being Mexico.

It’s “deja vu all over again”. Apparently the ideological tie that afflicted the US Presidential Election six years ago, and the deadlock that Thomas Mann has been writing about for a number of years, isn’t just an American thing. . . . At precisely the time in history when we need to be decisive, we’re afflicted with paralysis. We’ve got two approximately equal sides, equally convinced that they’re right, and in diametric opposition to one another about critical issues.

It all started with Bush v. Gore, and the mania is spreading with the same speculation being applied to other countries. In this case, Mexico. I do not think it is odd at all that such a thing is happening. This result is nearly guaranteed under the political system that we live under; that is, presidentialism.

Presidential democracies tend to create the conditions whereby two major national parties emerge after time, acting as umbrella organizations for the left and right. However, presidentialism, whether practiced in the United States or Ukraine, is divisive and makes for an inherently unstable system.

Just imagine, for a second, what we’re voting for. One man/woman, with an extreme amount of power, all decided upon by usually just more than half the vote on one side of the ideological divide. This is where the obsession with the presidency comes from. Rather than being focused on platforms and issues, parties and their constituents are single-mindedly determined to capture the one post in the land that guarantees enormous political power. Couple that with the fact that a president retains power for a set period of time, even if he has lost popular legitimacy, and you have a rigidity that creates inherent instability.

Can you see how such a mentality would be unstable for the political system of the United States, not to mention places like Mexico, or the rest of Latin America?

This isn’t just me speaking. This is pure, researched political science. Presidential systems, because of what I have just described, lead to absolutism and a decreased faith in democracy among the people, as all of the country’s major groups do not get a fair say in how things are run. A lot of this has to do with resulting party and institutional structure — in which case multiple parties in a presidential system tends to be much worse than just two — but it also has to do with how these parties acknowledge the “rules of the game.” In an era of non-violent colored revolutions, people running in elections, even if they are clean, no longer abide by the rules of the game. They feel like they have nothing to lose and will do anything to win that presidency, even if it leaves the democratic system in shambles.

In Ukraine, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko led a democratic revolution against an obviously corrupt and unfair system; an authoritarianism that had manifested in presidentialism. But in Mexico, even with one of the cleanest electoral systems in the world, even after Lopez Obrador promised to bow to the electoral commission’s final results (which showed him losing), he is still putting Mexico’s entire political system at risk on purpose. Presidentialism is all too prone to people like him.

So if it may seem odd that such impasses are all coming to a head at once, it isn’t. What we are seeing is a result of the political systems that the people before us decided to adopt. Perhaps the real debate lies in how this impasse should be fixed with changes to the system itself.