As we discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, social stratification will inevitably develop in sedentary communities, and that includes distinctions between those who govern and those who are governed. This paragraph is divided into three subsections. In thefirst subsection, and following Blondel’s categorization (1995), we will briefly discuss five main types of political systems. In this section some attention needs to be given to the type of politicalpartysystem since it is related to the type of political system. However, and strictly speaking, the political party system is not part of the administrative/governmental system. The political party system mobilizes people to participate in the political process, by serving as platform for advocacy, by channeling people’s desires and needs into policies and programs, and is (in most countries anyway; the United States is an exception) the body that selects candidates for public office from among its membership. After this excursion into some- thing that is outside the structure of government, we continue characterizing the institutional superstructure of governments. In the second subsection of this section, we outline the distinctions between unitary and federal systems and pay attention to degrees of centralization and decentralization in each. The third subsection is devoted to the comparative typological analysis of democratic systems in general. We then zoom in on the expression of democracy in presidential and parliamentary systems in the fourth subsection.
Five Types of Political Systems in Relation to Political Party System
For most of history, political systems were to a smaller or larger degree based on traditional authority. There generally was one ruler who ruled with support of the social, economic, and political elite of the territory. The population at large had no political rights; hence most historical political systems were inegalitarian by nature. Thesetraditional inegalitarian political systems,as Blondel called them (1995, p. 38), are thus basically“absolutist.”
Historical examples would include almost all political regimes of sedentary communities across the globe in the past; early modern examples are the absolutist monarchies in Western Europe in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Blondel labeled these systems as “traditional” because they preserve oligarchy and social inequality, while at the same time retain some degree of popular support. In the contemporary world, this type of regime has become very rare but is still found in the Arabian peninsula, in parts of southern Africa, and in the Himalayas.
Once popular support for a traditional regime is diminishing, a political system may become moreauthoritarian-inegalitarian(Blondel, 1995, p. 39).
However, authoritarian-inegalitarian regimes may also emerge in response to problems in a liberal-democratic system (as in the cases of emerging fascism in Italy and national socialism in Germany after the First World War) or in response to failing populist regimes (as has happened in newly independent states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America after the Second World War).Populist political systemsemerged especially in South America in the earlier nineteenth century and in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. For such a system to succeed it is important to have strong and charismatic leadership.
Blondel’s typology mentions two much more common systems, namely the egalitarian–authoritarian and the liberal democratic systems. Commu- nist countries generally haveegalitarian-authoritarian systems, and examples include the former Soviet Union, countries in Eastern Europe that were satellites of the USSR, China, North Korea, Mongolia, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. The egalitarian-authoritarian label may seem paradoxical, but Blondel argues that popular unrest in Russia and Eastern Europe since the 1990s suggests that communist regimes were more egalitarian than those that replaced them (Blondel, 1995, pp. 37–38).
North Korea has become more authoritarian as well.
Finally, there are theliberal democratic systemsfound in Australia, India, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, North America, several South American states, South Korea, Western European countries, and some countries in Africa and East Asia. We will pay a little more attention to these liberal democratic systems since they have been gaining ground steadily from the mid- nineteenth century on (see subsections following).
One feature of many contemporary political systems is that they have political parties. We will not discuss political party systems in detail, nor electoral systems, nor types of political parties (tribal, ethnic, religious, class- based, and so forth), since this lies outside the objective of this book.
However, since it is part of the context in which governments operate, we will pay some attention to it.
In the earliest human communities, we assume that the bonds of band and tribe must have been strong enough to deal with interpersonal conflict and collective challenges. There is no archaeological evidence of formal political institutions in hunter-gatherer societies, let alone political parties.
Most historical political systems had formal political institutions, but there were no political parties. Rulers came to power on the basis of hereditary right or military might. In suchno-party systems the local community must have been strong enough to manage collective needs. Whether people felt any conflict with the center or had different opinions about the structure of the society at large, its organization, or its policies, we do not know. We do know, however, that sometimes they successfully rose in revolt, and the best examples are the American and French Revolutions. In the modern world there are very few no-party systems left (Blondel, 1995, p. 154). Most of these are found in the Arabian peninsula. The no-party systems in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Libya were replaced by single-party systems in the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1970s and 1980s, military regimes in African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern countries abolished political parties, but those regimes proved unstable, and they are in decline since the 1990s.
With an eye on the Arab Spring since 2010, it seems that the legitimacy of one- or single-party systems is increasingly under siege. Rulers have been forced out in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen. There have been civil uprisings in Bahrain, and they are still (at the time of this writing) ongoing in Syria. Major civil unrest occurred in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, and Sudan; minor civil unrest has been observed in Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, and the Western Sahara.
In earlier times there may have been prepolitical“parties,”and those are termed“factions.”One example are the factions in the Senate of the Roman Republic, some supporting the republican ideal, with others leaning more toward monarchy (especially in the swirling debates around what Julius Ceasar wanted: to be king or not). Another example is the seven- teenth and eighteenth century Dutch Republic of the Seven United Provinces, where two factions strove to realize their view of the desired political system. The Orange Faction wanted a confederacy with a strong stadtholder in the person of the Prince of Orange-Nassau. The State Faction favored a confederacy where the highest-ranking confederate official/civil servant (that was the State-Pensionary) would be running the republic’s business. (On a side note: Some political parties in the contemporary Dutch kingdom favor monarchy while others advance the notion of a republic.) Political parties are unique to the modern world. They emerged in the nineteenth century, at the same time as or in the slipstream of the
appearance of labor unions. The position of the people evolved and changed dramatically as well: from people as subjects to people as citizens with rights, and not merely obligations. Those citizens then turned into voters (Vigoda, 2002a). People as citizens (see Chapter 4) discovered the freedom of association and found strength in numbers. Political parties and labor unions also became a mechanism, and they networked to link citizens to local, regional, and national levels. It helped that, at the same time, newspapers became widely available to the public at large.
No-party and single-party systems are not particularly stable, for both may suppress discussion of conflict (the following based on Blondel, 1995, pp. 156–158).Single-party systemshave been a feature of totalitarian govern- ments under communist, fascist, or national-socialist regimes. Also, many single-party systems emerged in Africa after independence, but these were often toppled by military coups. There are/have been countries where one party is so dominant that it dwarfs the others (Egypt, Madagascar, Mexico, Nicaragua, Singapore, and Taiwan) (for more detail on single-party systems, see Blondel, pp. 159–163).
Two-party, two-and-a-half party, multiparty with dominant party, and multiparty without dominant party systems (the distinctions from Blondel, 1995, pp. 170–171; the brief discussion below also Blondel, 1995, pp. 171–179) generate competition among various groups, but it is impossible to characterize countries simply because “times they are a-changing.” For instance, until the 1970s Austria, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States had a two-party system. Looking at Britain only, in the 1970s the Liberal Party emerged, marginalized in the 1990s, and is currently (2013) the junior partner in the cabinet. The great disadvantage of a two-party system is the potential for severe politicization. This is no better illustrated than with the example of the United States. That the White House and Senate are in Democratic hands, and the House controlled by the Republicans since 2010, has resulted in serious gridlock.
Another problem with the two-party system, also known as thefirst-past- the-post system, is that the winning party may well engage in“na-na boo- boo politics,”that is, a politics that generates an attitude of“now that I’m in power I’ll reverse some of the previous administration’s decisions.”
That a two-party system can work is shown by, for instance, Germany since the Second World War and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.
Two-party systems are also known as majoritarian systems, since one party has a majority in the legislature. Multiparty systems are referred to as consensual systems, since no party has or is expected to gain an absolute majority in the legislature. Examples of these include France, Israel, the
Netherlands, and Nigeria. In these countries, ministerial cabinets are generally coalitions of parties. As an introduction to the next subsection we refer to Arend Lijphart’s work, that established how consensus democ- racies generally “demonstrate [ . . . ] kinder and gentler qualities . . .”
They are usually welfare states, incarcerate fewer people, are more gener- ous with development aid, and are better at protecting the environment (1999, pp. 274–275).
Unitary and Federal Systems
We have seen in Chapter 3 how states came to define jurisdictions at the subnational level:first at the regional, and then at the local level. Hence, states can also be characterized in terms of the basic relations between the national and the subnational levels of government. In unitary states the authority of subnational levels of government is granted by the national level. The large majority of states in the world have a unitary basis. Infederal states the national level of government generally shares sovereignty with (usually) the regional level of government. The local level in a federal state, though, derives its authority from the regional level, and is therefore in a unitary relation. Federal states are often large in terms of territory, and examples include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Iraq, Mexico, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, Spain, Venezuela, and the United States. There are, though, also smaller federations such as Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Comoros islands, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Palau (also known as Belau).
Within federal systems a distinction can be made between dual and cooperative federalism. In the case ofdual federalism(also known as layer- cake federalism) authority and responsibilities of the federal level are clearly demarcated from those of the subnational levels. It has been argued that the United States in the nineteenth century was an example of this, but most scholars argue that it was theory rather than reality (Elazar, 1966;
O’Toole, 2000; Wright, 1988, p. 67). The reality in the United States is one ofcooperative federalism (also known as marble-cake federalism) where the different levels of government are together active with and responsible for policy making and service delivery. An excellent visual illustration of that is the intricate and expansive cooperative structure of early childhood edu- cation programs in Minnesota (Sandfort, 2010, p. 640).
Several types of federal systems have been distinguished in the literature (see Watts, 2008, pp. 10–11) but for the purposes of this book these need not be discussed, except for one. Aconfederal political systemis where political
power rests with the constituent parts. Historical examples include the United States (1774–1787) and the Dutch Republic (1581–1795); contem- porary examples include the European Union, Serbia and Montenegro, and Switzerland.
Having a unitary or federal overall structure is not a static situation.
Countries have shifted between being a confederal, federal, and unitary political system (for instance, Argentina, Germany, Mexico). More impor- tant, though, is that unitary and federal states vary in the degree to which they are centralized or decentralized (see Table 5.1). Following Ronald Watts (2008, pp. 171–177), a single dimension does not exist upon which the degree of autonomy of subnational governments can be determined. Instead, we need to consider several: legislative, administrative, and financial decentralization; constitutional limitations; and the nature of federal deci- sion making. For detail on each of these dimensions we refer to Watts, but we shall provide some examples. For instance, the Netherlands is characterized as a decentralized unitary state. Close to 90 percent of local government revenue is dependent upon transfers from national government, but in every other respect Dutch municipalities have considerable autonomy.
The distinctions between countries are not as clear-cut as may be suggested when looking at Table 5.1. For instance, since the Loi Deferre (1982), France has become more decentralized. Indeed, in any country the