In American discourse separation of powers is more a name than a description. None of the three branches (legislative, executive, or judicial) of the national government are clearly separate from one another. Congress, for example, has an impeachment club to check the others; the president's veto power is plainly legislative in nature. No wonder James Madison in The Federalist, no. 47, undertook to answer the Anti‐Federalist charge that “The several departments of power are [not separated but] blended in such a manner as at once to destroy all symmetry and beauty of form, and to expose some of the essential parts of the edifice to the danger of being crushed by the disproportionate weight of other parts.” Madison's answer was that Montesquieu—the “oracle” of separation—did not mean that “departments ought to have no partial agency in, or control over, the acts of each other.” He meant rather that “the whole power of one department [should not be] exercised by the same hands which possess the whole power of another department.” The merit of “blending,” according to Madison, was that, along with bicameralism and federalism, it produced a safety net of “checks and balances.”

A crucial problem is that split power inevitably entails split accountability. No wonder then that so many difficulties in American government spring ultimately from its divided power system. In contrast, the parliamentary system seeks safety in clear, direct lines of electoral accountability—and less in a mechanistic clash of sundered agencies of government. Concentrating power for effective action in a prime minister, it makes that person directly amenable to parliament while the latter is directly amenable to the electorate. This scheme largely eliminates what for Americans is a persistent quandary: which of several shells hide the peas of power and responsibility? That quandary partially