Why do you think there has not yet been a woman president in the United States?

Yet a woman president of the U.S. still remains only a hypothetical.

The 2020 Democratic nomination contest originally featured six women candidates, a record number. But the most prominent female candidates for the Democratic nomination – Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar – have all dropped out, and the focus of the race has narrowed to two males.

My research examines what countries where women run the government have in common – and why the U.S. still lags behind.

Where women lead

Since 2000, 89 women have newly come to power. That’s more than double the total number of women who entered office between 1960 and 1999.

answer: a parliamentary system is a system of democratic governance of a state where the executive derives its democratic legitimacy from its ability to command the confidence of the legislature, typically a parliament, and is also held accountable to that parliament. in a parliamentary system, the head of state is usually a person distinct from the head of government. this is in contrast to a presidential system, where the head of state often is also the head of government and, most importantly, the executive does not derive its democratic legitimacy from the legislature.

countries with parliamentary democracies may be constitutional monarchies, where a monarch is the head of state while the head of government is almost always a member of parliament (such as the united kingdom, denmark, sweden, and japan), or parliamentary republics, where a mostly ceremonial president is the head of state while the head of government is regularly from the legislature (such as ireland, germany, india, and italy). in a few parliamentary republics, such as botswana, south africa, and suriname, among some others, the head of government is also head of state, but is elected by and is answerable to parliament. in bicameral parliaments, the head of government is generally, though not always, a member of the lower house.

parliamentarianism is the dominant form of government in europe, with 32 of its 50 sovereign states being parliamentarian. it is also common in the caribbean, being the form of government of 10 of its 13 island states, and in oceania. elsewhere in the world, parliamentary countries are less common, but they are distributed through all continents, most often in former colonies of the british empire that subscribe to a particular brand of parliamentarianism known as the westminster system.

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