Introduction: Shared, not Separated

Hi there. My name is Dr Andrew Rowe.

I'm a senior lecturer in American politics at

the University of Kent here in beautiful Canterbury.

I'm going to be talking to you today about the separation of powers

and also checks and balances. Before we dive into those topics.

I think we just need to get a bit of terminology out of the way. Um,

so let me clarify a couple of things before we start

talking about the separation of powers and checks and balances,

and that is what we mean by institutions and structures of power.

So when we talk about institutions were referring to things like Congress,

the presidency, the Supreme Court also things like political parties, the media,

the electoral process.

These are institutions.

I'll also talk a lot about structures of power.

And this refers to how these institutions interact with each other.

So ultimately, politics is about power, and therefore,

the study of politics is the study

of power.

And to really understand the American political system,

we need to look at both institutions

and also these structures of power.

that's true for any political system that you are

studying just to take this a little bit further.

Let's think about an analogy here in terms of institutions and structures of power.

I think a useful analogy might be the English Premier League.

So within this structure

we have institutions.

These are the clubs Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea.

These are the institutions.

These are physical entities. You can observe.

You can watch them on Saturday afternoon.

But how they operate, how they relate to each other is a power structure,

and that's established by the English Premier League. Who plays when?

How many points you get for a win or a loss when to use the A.

What the transfer rules are what the disciplinary rules are.

These are all established by the EPA of the English Premier League.

You can't see or grab the Premier League as a physical entity,

but it exists and it structures the English elite football game.

Likewise, you can't directly observe the separation of powers.

You can't directly observe checks and balances.

In fact,

the words separation of powers and checks and

balances don't even appear in the American Constitution.

But they're they're they're the central structures of power,

which are key to understanding American politics.

And if you understand these two things separation of powers

and checks and balances and how they interact together,

you are well on your way to a good

understanding of how the American political system works.

Everything else can be slotted into that framework.

Mm. Now,

contrary to what you might have read in your textbooks, or even, perhaps,

what you've been taught,

the American political system should not be defined as a separation of powers.

It does not have a separation of powers, as that term is strictly defined.

And the key purpose of this talk today is to show you why

and also to explain instead the real structure of power in, uh, the United States.

So briefly stated the argument.

The key argument I'm going to make is that powers in the U.

S are not separated, but they are shared,

shared, not separated, shared between the presidency and Congress

and the Supreme Court also shared between the federal

or national government and the 50 state government.

That's not a topic that we're going to look at today.

Federalism is a topic for a different day,

but federalism is another example of how power is shared

in the United States. Now Richard Newstead,

who wrote this absolute classic book on American

politics called Presidential Power and the Modern Presidency,

put it best, I think, when he said,

the American political system is best defined as quote separated institutions,

sharing powers, separated institutions, sharing powers

so the institutions are separate.

Yes, there's a presidency which is separate from the Congress,

which is separate from the Supreme Court, but they share powers.

Okay, that's the argument I'm going to make today.

And if you only read one book on American politics in your lifetime,

in addition to your textbook, it should be this one.

It's fantastic,

published in 1990

as relevant today as it was them. So

just to summarise here. So in the U. S. Checks and balances

interact with the separation of powers. What they actually do

is undermine or attenuate the separation of powers in order to preserve it.

Okay, I recognise that That might seem contradictory. I recognise that.

Might that might sound counterintuitive.

How can something undermine it in order to preserve it?

Well, that's the argument is going to make today.

That's hopefully by the end of this talk that's what you will understand,

Uh, in 50 minutes or however long it takes to get there.

It's a difficult idea to grasp. I fully appreciate that.

But what the checks and balances do is they undermine our attenuate,

the separation of powers, but with the intention of preserving the separation.