Stephen Gardbaum (University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) – School of Law) has posted Democratic Design and the Twin Contemporary Challenges of Fragmented and Unduly Concentrated Political Power (in The Entrenchment of Democracy: The Comparative Constitutional Law of Elections, Parties, and Voting (Tom Ginsburg, Aziz Huq, Tarun Khaitan, eds., forthcoming)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Democratic governance has four key values: (1) effective, (2) stable, (3) accountable government, and (4) representative and deliberative legislative bodies. Given the trade-offs among them, democratic polities cannot achieve all of these values equally but they are expected to attain at least a “minimum core” of each and to aim at balancing or perhaps jointly optimizing them.
This goal faces both a general problem and a more specific contemporary one. The general, and longstanding, problem is the central role and importance of political parties in modern democracies. Because parties and their leaders compete to occupy two of the major governance institutions (the executive and legislature) and exercise public power, they can concentrate such power where the same party controls both and also disperse it where it does not, regardless of the formal relationship between these institutions. Such concentration or dispersal threatens various of the values. This general problem is exacerbated by specific features of the contemporary political party systems in many democracies today. So, whether and to what extent parties are polarized, fragmented, or subject to hyper-partisanship also affects the difficulty of balancing the four values, as well as helping to create the type of alienation from democratic politics “as usual” that has fueled various types of populism over the past decade.
Both the general and special problems can and do arise in all standard modern democratic regime types, which turn on the combination of (a) form of government and (b) political party and electoral systems. These are two party/majoritarian presidential, parliamentary, and semi-presidential systems and multiparty/proportional representation versions of each.
“Semi-parliamentarism” has recently been identified as a new and alternative democratic regime type, that its proponents argue is superior to existing ones. In this chapter, my aim is to explore the broader promise of semi-parliamentarism by asking whether it can be adapted to suggest versions of non-parliamentary democratic regimes that better reconcile and optimize the four values and address the specific challenges of party polarization, fragmentation, and hyper-partisanship. In other words, my focus is not on the question of which regime type is superior overall, but rather on how to maximize the potential benefits of the semi-parliamentary model through ambitious, but not wholesale, design reforms in the face of current democratic challenges. Specifically, I argue that semi-parliamentarism’s core feature of “symmetrical” and “incongruent” bicameralism is detachable from parliamentarism and that, with suitably customized modifications, is available in presidential and semi-presidential versions that may similarly reduce the contemporary pathologies of party systems and better balance the underlying values of democratic governance than existing regimes of these types. In so doing, all three adapted forms may also address some of the causes, and resist some of the consequences, of democratic backsliding in general and authoritarian populism in particular.
Highly recommended.