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E-book Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism : Democratic Design and the Separation of Powers

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Penilaian

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This book argues that, in a democracy, a constitutional separation of powersbetween the executive and the assembly may be a good thing, but the constitu-tional concentration of executive power in a single human being—what I callexecutive personalism—is not.This thesis may seem plausible, perhaps too plausible to be interesting.Yet almost the entire democratic world is dominated by only three types ofconstitutions, all of which fail to disentangle the separation of powers fromexecutive personalism: On the one hand, parliamentary constitutions rejectboth, while, on the other hand, their presidential and semi-presidential coun-terparts embrace both. And even though these three types of constitutions arefairly old (the youngest was invented in 1919), there has been surprisingly littleacademic thinking about strategies to decouple the separation of powers fromexecutive personalism. I argue that this decoupling is desirable and exploreone widely neglected strategy, which I call, for want of a better term, semi-parliamentary government (Ganghof 2018a). Semi-parliamentarism achievespowers separation without executive personalism. I use “executive personalism” to describe the extent to which constitutionalrules (a) vest executive power in a single human being; who (b) is demo-cratically authorized directly by the voters; and (c) who cannot be dismissedfor political reasons by any collective and representative entity, such as anassembly or a political party. To the extent that these conditions hold, exec-utive power is personalized by the constitution. Executive personalism thusunderstood is, in an important sense, a historical overhang from monarchy(Colomer 2013;Nelson 2014;Scheuerman 2005). Or, asPrakash (2020: 24)suggests for the United States of America, it is itself a form of “limited monar-chy”; we just do not recognize this “because we have been fooled by the mythsabout the Founding and misled by our stereotypes of what makes a king.” The concept of executive personalism says nothing about how much powerthe chief executive has. In principle, this power may be heavily constrainedby the constitutional checks and balances of a separation-of-powers system, aswell as informally by political parties and public opinion. Executive person-alism must, nevertheless, be conceptually distinguished from the separationof powers. The latter does not require the former. Moreover, executive per-sonalism seems to have a causal tendency, under a broad range of backgroundconditions, to strengthen presidential power and undermine and erode formaland informal constraints on the executive (e.g.Ginsberg 2016: 38–52;Posner2016;Prakash 2020;Samuels and Shugart 2010).Whether or not the separation of powers becomes connected to executivepersonalism depends on its precise location between the two branches. Underparliamentary government, the executive is selected by the assembly and canalso be dismissed by it for purely political reasons—there is a fusion of powersbetween the executive and the assembly majority. In a single chain of delega-tion, voters elect one collective agent, the assembly, which then selects a primeminister and cabinet as agents of the assembly (Strøm 2000). Under presiden-tialism and semi-presidentialism, voters also popularly elect, for a fixed term,a second agent: the president. The separation of powers thus becomes entan-gled with executive personalism. The difference between presidentialism andsemi-presidentialism is the location of powers separation. Under presiden-tialism, the president essentiallyisthe executive, so that power is separatedbetween the executive and the legislature. Under semi-presidentialism, thereis also a prime minister and cabinet responsible to the assembly, so that the lo-cus of powers separation is shifted into the executive: One part (the president)is separated from the assembly, while the other part (the prime minister andcabinet) is fused with it.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

321.8042 GAN b

Penerbit

London : Oxford University Press., 2021

Deskripsi Fisik

225 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780192897145

Klasifikasi

321.8042

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Presidential Government

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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