Power in office: presidents, governments, and parliaments in the institutional design of contemporary democracies
- PDF / 942,423 Bytes
- 18 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 100 Downloads / 188 Views
Power in office: presidents, governments, and parliaments in the institutional design of contemporary democracies Giuseppe Ieraci1 Accepted: 18 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The institutional design of democratic regimes has attracted much attention from a legal and political perspective, because it affects the actual distribution of power among political actors and the effectiveness of their decisions. The article advances a classification of the democratic institutional design, with particular reference to the triangular interactions among Presidents, Governments, and Parliaments. Moving from the assumption that the arrangements among these three top political institutions identify the main patterns of the democratic government, the distinction among Parliamentary, Presidential, and Semi-Presidential systems set by the constitutional law is rejected and a new classification schema is advanced. In this new perspective, the institutional design of democracy consists of the institutional roles of authority, procedural resources attached to them and arenas of confrontation among the roles. Keywords Presidents · Governments · Parliaments · Institutional design · Democracy JEL Classification H · H11
1 Introduction Contemporary political science has established itself on methodological and conceptual bases which have marked its distance from the formal and legal analysis of political institutions. Nonetheless, following or adapting the seminal work by Duverger (1980; 1986) the triangular relationship among parliaments, presidents and governments has sometimes been reduced to three ideal-types: the Parliamentary, the Presidential, and the Semi-Presidential outlined by the constitutional scholars.1 This classification generates some ambiguities which political scientists have been 1
For a reappraisal of Duverger’s concept of semipresidentialism, see Bahro, Bayerlein and Veser (1998).
* Giuseppe Ieraci [email protected] 1
Università degli Studi di Trieste, Trieste, Italy
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
G. Ieraci
dealing with for a long time. If we took into consideration the parliamentary system, for instance, and its legal definition as a model in which the government (or executive) depends on the parliament (or legislature) we would be led to the unsatisfactory conclusion that the English cabinet model does not differ in any significant way from the Italian or French IV Republic parliamentary models, notwithstanding that the former has a monocratic structure in which the Prime Minister holds a prominent position in the Cabinet, while the latter have a collegial executive structure where the President of the Council of Minsters is a primus inter pares. Similar inconsistencies can be spotted in the long lasting debate over the mixed pattern of government, labeled semi-presidentialism and known as a generalization of the French V Republic’s case. The subsequent attempt to force into it any other case resembling formally that ideal-type has raised several problems. Indeed, many cases with
Data Loading...
