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
TABLE 5.1. CHARACTERIZING STATES I: UNITARY–
FEDERAL AND CENTRALIZED–DECENTRALIZED
political-administrative system is to a larger or smaller degree always influx.
This can be illustrated by considering the reform capacity of various countries as Christopher Pollitt and Geert Bouckaert have done. The latter base their table loosely on Arend Lijphart’s work (Lijphart, 1984, p. 219 and Lijphart, 1999, pp. 110–111 and 248), but look in Table 5.2 at the different positions of Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, and Sweden when comparing Lijphart’s characterization with that of Pollitt and Bouckaert. It is likely that there have been changes in the past 25 years, but there could be another explanation. Lijphart characterizes political party systems in terms of whether they are majoritarian, intermediate, or consensualist, and these characteristics occupy both the X- and Y-axes.
Thus to Lijphart the most majoritarian countries are New Zealand and the United Kingdom, while the United States is listed as majoritarian- consensualist (the most consensualist is Switzerland). Pollitt and Bouck- aert’s X-axis holds the same three types of systems as Lijphart’s matrix
TABLE 5.2. CHARACTERIZING STATES II: EXECUTIVE GOVERNMENT AND (DE)CENTRALIZED DIMENSIONS
Nature of Executive Government
Majoritarian Intermediate Consensual Centralized
(unitary) (Lijphart:
majoritarian)
New Zealand, United Kingdom
France Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany,Italy, Netherlands, United States Intermediate Iceland,
Luxembourg, Sweden
Norway,Sweden, France V
Finland,Italy, Japan
Decentralized (federal) (Lijphart:
consensual)
Australia, Canada, United States
Belgium, Germany, Finland, France IV, Netherlands
Switzerland
Source:When italicized the countries are from Lijphart, 1984, p. 219; when nonitalicized they are taken from Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011, p. 55. (Nota bene: We did not include Lijphart, 1999, p. 248, because in the 1999 edition he used an executives–parties dimension rather than a majoritarian– consensual dimension.)
does, but their Y-axis emphasizes the degree of (de)centralization com- bined with the extent to which a country can be labeled as unitary or federal. In other words, Pollitt and Bouckaert actually developed a more insightful table by combining two dimensions (nature of executive govern- ment; unitary to federal system).
Political systems can also be categorized in terms of their ability to reform.
Pollitt and Bouckaert distinguish five features of political-administrative systems: state structure, nature of executive government, political-adminis- trative relations, dominant administrative culture, and degree of diversity of stakeholders who provide policy advice. In this chapter we focus on state structure and the nature of executive government. In Chapter 6 we address the administrative culture, while in Chapter 8 we will consider political- administrative relations and those who are involved in policy advice.
Pollitt and Bouckaert define state structure as the extent to which authority is shared between levels of government (the vertical dimension) and the degree to which policy is coordinated at the national level (the horizontal dimension) (2011, p. 51). In Table 5.3 you can see their charac- terization of each state as federal or unitary and as centralized or decentral- ized, but now including the degree to which they are coordinated. We have added Israel to this table and added“decentralized”to their assessment of the Netherlands. The second element of coordination concerns the extent to which one or two national government departments drive reforms. In that sense, for instance, the Netherlands is fairly coordinated (the Departments of Home Affairs and of Finance), but a variety of reforms have been spearheaded by the Council of State, top political and administrative exec- utives, specially appointed state committees, and external actors (e.g., at the time of the French and German occupations, 1795–1813 and 1940–1945, respectively) (Van der Meer and Raadschelders, forthcoming). What is puzzling is that in their table Pollitt and Bouckeart label Germany as a coordinated system, but at the same time they argue (p. 54) that reform capacity is highly fragmented between a multitude of arenas and actors.
The second dimension Pollitt and Bouckaert discuss is the nature of the executive government, i.e., the cabinet, and they distinguish between four types:
• Single party, or minimal winning, or bare majority,
• Minimal-winning coalition where two or more parties have a little more than 50 percent of the legislative seats,
• Minority cabinets, and
• Oversized executives or grand coalitions.
This is in part related to the type of political party system.Majoritarian systems are generally two-party systems, while multiparty systems are by necessity more consensual. Theyfind that speed and severity of manage- ment reforms decline when moving from the left to the right in Table 5.2.
They also note that the scope of reform, which is defined as the amount of public-sector tasks and services that is affected by reform, declines when moving from the top to the bottom in Table 5.2. It is thus that they conclude that deep and rapid structural reforms are less difficult in majoritarian countries. Also, the more centralized a political system is, the less difficult it is to pursue reform (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011, pp. 55–56). We need to keep in mind, though, that these conclusions only pertain to Western countries; it may well be that in centralized developing countries reforms are not so easy to pursue. And then, as they observe, there is variation among majoritarian countries as well. In the United Kingdom the prime minister has far more control over his party members in the legislature than the American president has (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011, p. 58).
Goran Hyden has also looked at the executive capacity or rationality of political systems but then in relation to their legality or rule conformity and situating entire world regions in his matrix. He characterizes Western Europe as strong in rationality/executive capacity and firm in legality;
the United States as weak in rationality/executive capacity and firm in legality; Asia and Latin America as soft in legality but strong in rationality;
and Africa and Eastern Europe as soft in legality and weak in rationality (Hyden, 2012, p. 605).
Typologies of Democratic Systems
Imagine living in a close-knit group and moving from one place to the next in the search for food. Such hunter-gatherer groups are, in a way, direct democracies. Everybody knows everybody else, and interpersonal conflict is settled within the group by noninvolved individuals. In sedentary societies, people quickly will no longer know everybody else, and it is then that institutions are created that help meet collective needs and adjudicate in the case of interpersonal conflict. While we discussed this already in Chapter 2, it is important to reiterate this. While for most of history the majority of people lived as mere subjects, it is in the last two centuries that they have become citizens who partake in indirect, representative democ- racy through passive and active voting rights. Since the Atlantic Revolutions people in democracies are considered equal in the eyes of the law.
Obviously, they are unequal in a social sense and—chapeau Robert
Michels—some will always be more powerful than the multitude. What is it that makes large-scale democracy work? Is it not amazing that in democratic societies with thousands, millions, and—sometimes—hundreds of millions of people, violation of private rights by government is actually quite limited?
That is to say, it still happens but is considerably less than in earlier times or in nondemocratic states. Sure, superficially we could point to the existence of sanctioning systems, such as a police force and a judiciary; but no sanctioning arrangement can handle a society where everybody violates the law.
Hence, deeper down, there is something else about (liberal) demo- cratic societies that actually makes them more fair and effective, and that is not an array of institutional arrangements but rather an individual attitude.
And here it is fitting to quote Mill:
The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. [. . .]
Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.” (Mill, 1983, p. 72)
The reader may be more familiar with the following two quotations by Mill that can be found when googling the word“freedom.”Thefirst:“I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than attempting to satisfy them.”The second:“Your freedom to punch me ends where my nose begins.”(Nota bene: We tried tofind the source of these quotes but were not successful.) Mill’s observation is nothing else but a secular version of the Golden Rule:Democracy will thrive through self-restraint and is learned, not imposed.But how can societies get to that point?
Perhaps communal life within nomadic bands was/is relatively peace- ful; the high degree of social control assuring that interpersonal conflicts will not get out of hand. But how can collective challenges be met and interpersonal conflicts settled when people start living together in ever- larger concentrations without knowing one another? The answer is that it is possible through the establishment of institutional arrangements that are structured around emergent and solidifying social stratification. The territorialization and bureaucratization of the world are top-down pro- cesses that work as long as people have notfigured out how to create and maintain a large-scale self-governing system. From the extensive research done by Elinor Ostrom (1990) and many others in her orbit we know that
people can govern themselves successfully, but only on a relatively small scale. The first large-scale experiment with democracy is that of the United States, certainly large in territory from its beginnings, and increas- ingly large in terms of population. The democratization of the world started in the late eighteenth century and has not stopped since. There were not many indirect and representative democracies in the early nineteenth century. By the early 1970s there were 39 democracies in a total of 150 countries (=27.3 percent) (Diamond, 2002, p. 2; on p.58, Table 1, he lists 41 democracies). By 2002 this had increased to a total of 121 democracies among a total of 192 countries. This is as much a function of copying behavior, of multilateral donors desiring democratic reforms, as it is of normative diffusion through an underlying network of intergovernmental and international nongovernmental organizations (Torfason and Ingram, 2010).
That democracy has tripled by the early twenty-first century so that more than half of the world’s countries can to a smaller or larger degree be labeled as a democracy is great, but these numbers do not tell the whole story. Even though the percentage of states rated as “free” by Freedom House increased from 29 percent in 1972 to more than 46 percent in 2002 (Torfason and Ingram, 2010, p. 59), the percentage of“illiberal democra- cies”has increased as well. Liberal democracies with fair, free, and frequent elections, with a rule of law, an independent judiciary, checks and balances of and upon (political) power, and with the protection of human freedoms accounted for a little more than 81 percent of all democracies in 1974, while only for almost 61 percent in 2002. In other words,“illiberal democracies”
where human rights are not well protected, where there is corruption together with a variety of social and economic challenges, have increased (Torfason and Ingram, 2010, pp. 5 and 62).
Diamond (2002) mentions four possible reasons for the fact that democracy has become, in his words, shallower:
a. deterioration of quality of governance and rule of law;
b. diffusion of liberal democracy shows regional variation: complete in Western Europe and Anglo-American countries (100 percent), almost complete in East Central Europe and the Baltics (about 75 percent), a touch less than 50 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, less than 30 percent in the Asia-Pacific region, a little more than 5 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa, and none in countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union (the Baltic states excepted). The Arab world has no true
democracy, but we will have to wait and see what the outcome of the various uprisings will be;
c. several political regimes that appeared to move toward democratic rule settled once more for a type of authoritarian rule (e.g., especially in African and former Soviet Union countries); and
d. many of the democracies that were created after the fall of the Berlin Wall (1991) experience the same domestic (economic and political development) and international challenges (standing in the interna- tional community) as the newly independent states in Africa and Asia in the 1950s and ’60s (Diamond, 2002, p. 4).
In light of Mill’s insight, democratization is ultimately a bottom-up process. It is not possible to flip a switch in a population where the majority of people were subjects rather than citizens, or where people have only known totalitarianism and dictatorship, and tell individuals that
“we have liberated you; as of today you live in a democracy.” In other words, the institutional arrangements for democracy that we briefly describe later stand or fall with the restraint of the individual. We will first focus on types of democratic systems in general, and then (in the next subsection) concentrate on the distinction between parliamentary and presidential systems.
A democracy can be established with or without a constitution. Many countries have a founding and compact document, but it is not necessary. A series of constituting documents will serve the same purpose; namely, that of grounding a country’s government and citizenship in a set of fundamen- tal laws. Two well-known examples are the United Kingdom and Israel (Lane, 1996, p. 7). Whatever the grounding document or documents, it is assumed that people in a democracy have a sense of homogeneity, of belonging together. In truly and sociologically homogeneous societies people share a language, a history, and an ethnicity. Now that many Western countries have experienced rapid immigration and have become less homogeneous, it is and should be in citizenship that we find a renewed, albeit more abstract, sense of homogeneity. Perhaps developing countries are less challenged in this respect and thus are still to a larger degree societally homogeneous. That may actually bode well for hopes of democ- ratization. Now, to be sure, democracy can emerge in both homogeneous and heterogeneous societies, but that depends in the eyes of Gabriel Almond (1968, pp. 55–66) upon political culture and the differentiation of the political system. In his view, a homogeneous political culture is one
where the citizenry agrees about the core political values and their priorit- ies. He regards Anglo-American countries as the most stable because there are no serious cleavages in society and the political system is highly differentiated. While the political systems of Western Europe are as differ- entiated, they also have more fragmented political cultures. Cleavages can be based in religion (for instance, Catholics versus Protestants in the Netherlands and Germany; or religious versus secular Jews in Israel), ethnicity (for instance, African-Americans versus Caucasians), class (for instance, upper, middle, and lower classes in a society where social mobility is limited), and region (for instance, Flanders versus Wallonia in Belgium) (Lane and Ersson, 1989, ch. 2). Some countries have multiple cleavages (for instance, Belgium, Israel, Lebanon). As mentioned previously, we are inclined to think that Western countries have become less homogeneous as a consequence of immigration. This, though, does not have to be detrimental to democracy, and is not when political institutions are differ- entiated in a system of institutional arrangements that prohibits control of political power in the hands of one individual or body. The political system in Western countries is highly differentiated (see Section 3 later), while in preindustrial political systems—that is, before the late eighteenth century—
and in totalitarian systems political power is concentrated in one person or institution.
It is natural that people associate with those with whom they feel affinity, with those with whom they have grown up. However, in societies that experience social cleavages as a consequence of immigration, it would behoove policy makers to advance policies that help people recognize and value what binds them together: citizenship. A sense of togetherness based in citizenship rather than other social ties is challenging and may even be under pressure as a function of growing income inequality in many Western and non-Western countries. Income inequality is increasing in many countries (Economist, 2012) with the United States leading the way. By way of example one can look at executive compensation in comparison to the wages of ordinary workers. In 1999, CEO compensation in the United States was 34 times that of employees; in the United Kingdom “only” 24 times; France, 15; Germany, 13; and Japan, 11 (Knoke, 2001, p. 264).
Globalization, however, is reported to have influenced executive pay, in the sense that the difference between executive and employee pay has been steadily increasing.
It may seem that we have digressed from the theme of characterizing democratic systems, but one thing that practitioners and students of governments must be aware of is the extent to which democracy cannot
be taken for granted. Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy” may concern the concentration of political power only, but could be regarded as a specific example of a more general human condition: the instinct to protect oneself by whatever means and then potentially invade the freedom of others.
Growing income inequality points to lenience toward greed and concen- tration of economic power as well as wealth. This is potentially dangerous to any democracy.
How democracies can deal with the potential of instability has been explored by Seymour Martin Lipset and Arend Lijphart. Lipset suggested that a society is more stable when its value system rewards individual effort and performance. He contrasts such achievement societies to ascription societies where people get ahead on the basis of birth or rank. Obviously, he regards the United States as an excellent example. However, and in light of our brief excursion into income inequality, we suggest that social mobility is much less possible today in the United States than in the past (Portero, 2012). Lipset also agrees with Gabriel Almond that social homogeneity fosters stability (1963, 1979). Lijphart convincingly argued that stability can be found in homogeneous and fragmented societies alike, but that it then is a function of elite behavior. In a deeply divided society as the Netherlands during thefirst six decades of the twentieth century, it was the elites who created consensus in the pursuit of political objectives, while people were segregated along religious lines. He suggested that his country was moving in the 1960s from being pillarized to becoming more like a cartel democracy (that is, a harmony model) where there are no political subcultures (1968, p. 229). In view of what we wrote in Chapter 4 about immigrant societies, we may well again see political subcultures, especially among those who cling to a sense of Dutch nationality versus those who seek to accommodate cultural differences.
Many democracies will have competing elites, but these will not threaten political stability as long as the elites recognize the need for consensus and compromise. Obviously, this is easier to achieve in consensual than in majoritarian systems, especially when elites have lost the art of consensus as appears to be increasingly the case in the United States.
Presidential and Parliamentary Systems
We can now extend our discussion previously about the executive capacity of political systems on the one hand and types of democracies on the other, to contrasting parliamentary and presidential systems, which are by far the two dominant arrangements in democracies. In a parliamentary