Democracy and dictatorship revisited Cheibub, José Antonio; Gandhi, Jennifer; Vreeland, James Raymond
Public choice,
04/2010, Volume:
143, Issue:
1/2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
We address the strengths and weaknesses of the main available measures of political regime and extend the dichotomous regime classification first introduced in Alvarez et al. (Stud. Int. Dev. 31(2): ...3-36, 1996). This extension focuses on how incumbents are removed from office. We argue that differences across regime measures must be taken seriously and that they should be evaluated in terms of whether they (1) serve to address important research questions, (2) can be interpreted meaningfully, and (3) are reproducible. We argue that existing measures of democracy are not interchangeable and that the choice of measure should be guided by its theoretical and empirical underpinnings. We show that the choice of regime measure matters by replicating studies published in leading journals.
The Democracy Sourcebook offers a collection of
classic writings and contemporary scholarship on democracy, creating a book that can
be used by undergraduate and graduate students in a wide variety ...of courses,
including American politics, international relations, comparative politics, and
political philosophy. The editors have chosen substantial excerpts from the
essential theorists of the past, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill,
Alexis de Tocqueville, and the authors of The Federalist Papers;
they place them side by side with the work of such influential modern scholars as
Joseph Schumpeter, Adam Przeworski, Seymour Martin Lipset, Samuel P. Huntington,
Ronald Dworkin, and Amartya Sen.The book is divided into nine
self-contained chapters: "Defining Democracy," which discusses procedural,
deliberative, and substantive democracy; "Sources of Democracy," on why democracy
exists in some countries and not in others; "Democracy, Culture, and Society," about
cultural and sociological preconditions for democracy; "Democracy and
Constitutionalism," which focuses on the importance of independent courts and a bill
of rights; "Presidentialism versus Parliamentarianism"; "Representation," discussing
which is the fairest system of democratic accountability; "Interest Groups";
"Democracy's Effects," an examination of the effect of democracy on economic growth
and social inequality; and finally, "Democracy and the Global Order" discusses the
effects of democracy on international relations, including the propensity for war
and the erosion of national sovereignty by transnational forces.
Open list proportional representation (PR) systems require that candidates seek personal votes in order to be successful. This feature of the system is considered to lead to intense competition among ...co-partisans and, ultimately, to weak electoral and legislative parties, narrow public policies, localism, clientelism, and corruption. We examine the distribution of personal votes among candidates from the same party for seven elections to the Brazilian national chamber of deputies (1990–2014). These elections are widely seen as hyper-competitive, particularly among candidates from the same list. Yet, the patterns in the data are not compatible with such a view. We find that the level of overall competition is considerably lower than the absolute number of parties and candidates competing would suggest. More significantly, we find that the number of viable candidates within party lists is limited and that their votes are distributed in such a way that indicates a contained competition among co-partisans during the election. These findings add to recent work that builds a more nuanced view of ballot structure, competition, and personalism.
In parliamentary systems, political parties must often bargain with each other in order to form a government. Do parliamentary rules regulating government formation impact the type of government that ...is formed? Existing scholarship suggests that the need for an investiture vote—a requirement that a new government must face a parliamentary vote at some point during its formation—reduces the likelihood of a minority government. This article suggests that while real-world investiture rules can vary across several dimensions, only the investiture decision rule—which specifies the size of the majority required for a decision to be made—impacts the propensity for parties to form minority governments. Using new data on investiture rules for 26 European countries since 1946 or the first year of democracy, we find that parliamentary democracies that have an investiture requirement are not less likely to experience minority governments than those where governments come to power without an investiture vote. However, when an absolute majority is required for a government to succeed at the investiture stage, minority governments are considerably less likely to form; absolute majority investiture rules reduce the frequency of minority governments.
Are government coalitions less frequent under presidentialism than under parliamentarism? Do legislative deadlocks occur when presidents do not form majoritarian governments? Are presidential ...democracies more brittle when they are ruled by minorities? We answer these questions observing almost all democracies that existed between 1946 and 1999. It turns out that government coalitions occur in more than one half of the situations in which the president's party does not have a majority, that minority governments are not less successful legislatively than majority coalitions in both systems, and that the coalition status of the government has no impact on the survival of democracy in either system. Hence, whatever is wrong with presidentialism, is not due to the difficulty of forming coalitions.
Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism Cheibub, José Antonio; Elkins, Zachary; Ginsburg, Tom
British journal of political science,
07/2014, Volume:
44, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The presidential-parliamentary distinction is foundational to comparative politics and at the center of a large theoretical and empirical literature. However, an examination of constitutional texts ...suggests a fair degree of heterogeneity within these categories with respect to important institutional attributes. These observations indicate that the classic presidential-parliamentary distinction, and the semi-presidential category, may not be systemic. This article investigates whether the defining attributes that separate presidential and parliamentary constitutions predict other attributes that are stereotypically associated with these institutional models. The results suggest the need for considerable skepticism of the ‘systemic’ nature of the classification. Indeed, the results imply that in order to predict the powers of a country's executive and legislature, it is more useful to know where and when the constitution was written than whether the country has a presidential or parliamentary system.
Although often conceived as nonpartisan actors, presidents wield considerable political and institutional powers in parliamentary and semipresidential democracies. Do they interfere in the ...government-formation process in such a way as to change the outcome that parliamentary parties would have otherwise reached? We address this issue by examining the conditions under which the parties of presidents and prime ministers are the same in parliamentary and semipresidential democracies. We use data for twenty-one countries over the postwar period and find that when presidents are directly elected and are constitutionally empowered to nominate the prime minister, the two leaders tend to come from the same party. This, however, is only true when the bargaining environment within parliament is complex, that is, when there are multiple viable governing coalitions. In this sense, the distribution of forces within parliament is still the main factor determining the identity of the prime minister, even in the presence of strong presidents.
This paper analyses the institutions associated with government termination in parliamentary systems: no-confidence and confidence motions, and the early dissolution of the parliament. We consider ...constitutional texts for all European countries between 1800 and 2019 and identify two broad trends: (1) the constitutionalisation of practices that have first emerged as the result of strategic interactions between the government and the parliament; (2) the tendency towards protecting both the executive and the parliament from mutual interference. While the first tendency has culminated with an almost universal constitutionalisation of the principle of parliamentarism in European constitutions, the second led to the protection of executives and the extension of effective legislative terms. We suggest that these constitutional developments are associated with the stabilisation of parliamentarism after World War II and conclude that although parliamentarism remains a flexible system, contemporary regimes do not function like their forebears did in the 19th century.
The same institution that presumably led to democratic collapse is likely to also be associated with whatever difficulties the country faces in dealing with their many economic and social issues. ......in countries with presidential constitutions proposals abound for the introduction of parliamentarism, either in its pure form or in combination with a directly elected president; in countries with a strong parliamentary constitution, where an indirectly elected president was established to play a symbolic role, the focus is the introduction of direct popular presidential elections. ...the full extent of institutional interactions and their effects may not be knowable. ...choices are not made in a vacuum, and after centuries of constitutionalism and a long experience with representative governments, we are in a better position to weigh the benefits of a plunge into relatively uncharted territory against the costs of marginal adjustments in a form of government that has operated sufficiently long to be seen as part of a country's constitutional tradition. ...parties of the type required for the proper functioning of
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