Presidential vs. Parliamentary System

I was listening to an event presented by the Cato Institute on the legality of treasury exempting its own companies from certain tax regulations.  Frank Buckley from George Mason University Law was invited to discuss a presentation on the subject.  At 32:20 he goes into a discussion about the separation of powers and contrasts our own system with parliamentary democracies found elsewhere.

Surprisingly our system comes out unfavorably.  The parliamentary system leads to a more stable democracy and better protection of economic liberty.  He also points out that under our system laws tend to be ten times as lengthy.  Laws are harder to enact, which we might see as good.  Unfortunately they are also harder to repeal.  This is a serious matter, since it is often only after legislation is enacted that we can know all of its negative consequences.

As surprising as this is, what is even more surprising is that his remarks on this subject were allowed to pass without comment.  He even went as far as to state that James Madison was in error when he stated that the separation of powers, which is a feature of our system but not of parliamentary democracy, was a necessary check on tyranny.  This statement that one of our founding fathers was mistaken would seem to be very controversial, especially at the Cato Institute, where speaking about the cult of the founding fathers would not be far off.

I find his argument persuasive.  The empirical evidence on this subject is quite solid.  He only mentions anecdotal evidence from the states of the former Soviet Union, but I have read similar information in The Economic Effects of Constitutions and perhaps Democracy and Redistribution.  The former book stated that protection of property was better under the parliamentary system.  I think that One or the other of these books may have pointed out that with a presidential system there was a risk that the president would take over and you would have an autocracy.

I would be interested in whether or not his observation about legislation tending to be more lengthy under the presidential system would hold up.  The only evidence that he presented was that our health reform legislation was considerably longer than the corresponding legislation in Canada.  He suggested that legislation would be ten times longer, but if I understood him correctly, it was actually twenty times longer in the case that he cited.