While commenting on one of Warren Kinsella's older articles
(comment has not appeared as of this writing due either to
connection failure or queuing) I pointed out that when a
country has a directly-elected executive the executive tends to
win in any disputes it has with the legislature. Thinking on this
I realize that while there is a fair amount of anecdotal evidence
to support this position I haven't seen a published study on the
matter. Sure, directly-elected presidents have been shown to
​lower voter turn out for legislative elections and be less
willing to consult the electorate than either indirectly-elected
presidents or constitutional monarchs but do they cause
other harmful effects? Is an executive that has an advantage in
any fight with its legislature a bad thing?

And there is an advantage. The US President tends to be vastly more popular than Congress which gives them an
advantage in public disputes. My question is whether this imbalance in public goodwill is cause for concern. Well, cause
for concern for other countries. While our politicians actually have comparable levels of public goodwill to their US
counterparts (ie little) they don't have a directly-elected head of state to put the squeeze to them. They instead have an
executive appointed by the Crown made up of their peers which if it misbehaves ​badly enough can be tossed out. The
Prorogation Crisis illustrates this point. Harper had to work (lie) quite a bit to get the public on his side and he still had to
remove the contentious proposals from the budget bill to get it passed. I wonder if legislatures that have to deal with
directly-elected presidents can do as well. 

I have taken a large number of political quizzes over the years. Some, such as the Political Compass, I come back to from
time-to-time. I have noticed something unusual: no matter the country political opinion seems to flow along a diagonal
line from left-libertarian to right-authoritarian. No country seems to have a spectrum going from left-authoritarian to
right-libertarian. Check it out for yourself: Canada, New Zealand, Germany, Australia, and Ireland to name a few. One
of the few exceptions was Britain where things are a little chaotic. It should be noted that Britain didn't buck the trend
entirely, its just fuzzier. I'm rather curious as to why this is. After all it may say something about the intersection between
economic and social beliefs. 

Another trend worth looking at is what I call the 'Moderate Nazi Effect'. Stated simply, the closer a party comes to being
fully authoritarian the less able it is to be fully economically right wing. On the face of it this makes sense. If neo-
liberalism can be described as extreme withdrawal of the state from the economy and social safety net it is at odds with
the basic tenet of authoritarianism: everything must be controlled. Similar currents may exist throughout the political
landscape and presents the interesting possibility that, just as the one-dimensional model of politics was shown to be limited, the two-dimensional model may have to be tweaked to account for a certain 'lumpiness' of the political spectrum
which makes moving in certain directions easier for parties.

The above is important to consider since all of Canada's parties have been drifting rightward (as, if fact, most parties have
worldwide). I will end off with a display of my abilities with MS Paint: