So far we have characterized political systems in fairly straightforward ways as unitary or federal, as majoritarian or consensual, as democracy or totalitarian, and as parliamentary or presidential. These dichotomous representations help as afirst approximation of the nature of a political system but hide a much more complex reality that was ably categorized by Ferrell Heady in his distinction between party-prominent and bureaucratic-prominent political
TABLE 5.4. PARLIAMENTARY, PRESIDENTIAL, AND HYBRID DEMOCRACIES
Parliamentary Presidential Hybrid
Africa Botswana, Senegal, South Africa
Gambia, Ghana, Malawi, Namibia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe Americas Canada, Jamaica Brazil, Chile, Colombia,
Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, United States, Uruguay
Argentina, Bolivia, Peru,
Venezuela
Asia Pacific Australia, Fiji, Israel, India, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, Nepal, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey
Bangladesh, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea
Sri Lanka, Taiwan
Post-
Communist
Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Slovak Republic
Belarus Lithuania, Poland,
Romania, Russia, Ukraine Western Europe Austria, Belgium,
Denmark, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom
Portugal, Finland, France, Switzerland
Source:adapted from Carey, 2005, 93.
regimes. The following is based on Chapters 8 and 9 of his major study (2001) and wefind that his subtypes of each greatly clarify why it is important that the study of public administration pays attention to the political context in which governments operate.
We will begin with the party-prominent systems. Heady distinguished between four of these. Thefirst is thepolyarchal competitive system.Essential to this model is political competition, and political change occurs without disrupting the system. This is characteristic for all those democratic systems discussed in the previous section and is found predominantly in Western Europe and the Anglo-American countries but would also include the Philippines and Sri Lanka. Polyarchic or democratic systems operate on either a parliamentary or presidential model, and most newly independent states in Africa simply adopted one of these two models from the former colonial ruler (Heady, 2001, p. 372). The second type is thedominant-party semicompetitive system,where one party has held a monopoly of power for a substantial period of time. However, other parties do exist and are legal.
The dominant party is nondictatorial, and examples include India, Malaysia, and Mexico (Heady, 2001, p. 383). Thedominant-party mobilization systemis the third type, and in these there is less permissiveness in politics, actual or potential coercion is larger, and the dominant party is usually the only legal party. Examples include Egypt and Tanzania (Heady, 2001, p. 393). Thesefirst three types are quite common in developing countries (Heady, 2001, p. 371). Some African countries after independence experi- mented with communism, but it was not a great success. Finally, there are the communist totalitarian systems that have only one legal party, and a so- called parallel bureaucracy. This is the situation where the bureaucratic organization at each level of government is controlled and steered by its parallel level in the political hierarchy. This is also referred to as the Double Hierarchy Model (Mayntz, 1978, p. 77). Examples of these include China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, the former Soviet Union, and Vietnam (Heady, 2001, p. 403).
The second major category Heady distinguished is that ofbureaucratic- prominent systemswhere professional bureaucrats hold power directly or are indispensable to nonbureaucratic elites. Key policy-making positions are occupied by career government officials. A competitive party system never existed, is in jeopardy, or is superseded by bureaucracy (Heady, 2001, p. 313). This is the ultimate administrative state, one without political officeholders or where political officeholders and career civil servants have become blended (this is the pure hybrid of Image IV in Aberbach and others, 1981, pp. 4–16). In this type of system public officeholders are,
as Hegel called it, the new guardians of democracy (for discussion of this see Raadschelders and others, 2015b, p. 367). As far as we know the true administrative state—that is, one without political officeholders—has never existed. The closest is nineteenth-century Norway where career civil ser- vants governed but acknowledged the Swedish king as their head of state.
Heady identified six different types of bureaucratic-prominent systems.
Intraditional elite systemsmembers of the political elites owe their position to the old social system. These are decreasing in number, and presently they are mainly found in the Near East and North Africa (mainly in Islamic countries) (Heady, 2001, p. 314). Heady distinguished two subtypes. The ortho-traditional systemis largely traditional and aristocratic. The bureaucracy is relatively small and highly centralized. Its politics is geared toward system preservation. Examples include Iran before 1979 and Saudi Arabia (Heady, 2001, p. 315). At the beginning of the next chapter we shall see that this system is historically the most dominant. The second subtype is the neo- traditional systemwhere traditional regimes change, but no effort is made to become a truly parliamentary or presidential system. This type of country has never been colonized, and bureaucracy survived and prevailed as a well- entrenched institution of power. This is a rare type of policy since the only example that comes to mind is that of Iran (Heady, 2001, pp. 316–321).
The second main type is thepersonalist bureaucratic elite systemcharacter- istic of the caudillo or strongman regimes in Latin America that were dominated by (mostly) military leadership (Heady, 2001, p. 321). We write in the past tense because, despite its“popularity”in the twentieth century, there are very few, if any, of these regimes left in Latin America. There have been some in Africa as well (for instance, Idi Amin in Uganda in the 1970s) (Heady, 2001, pp. 321–327). The caudillo regime is hierarchical by nature and thus differs from ajunta,which is acollegial bureaucratic elite system—the third type—that used to be characteristic of many Central American countries, and of Greece between 1967 and 1974, Portugal 1974–1976, and Pakistan between 1977–1988 and 1999–2008. Ajuntais a collegial body of professional administrators, usually military officers, who exercise politi- cal leadership. They have often done so as an intermediate solution following a military strongman and preparing for civilian-military coalition bureaucratic regime (Heady, 2001, pp. 327–330). This type of regime has declined since the late 1990s and, as far as we know, the only two left are Fiji and North Korea.
The law-and-order regime, fourth, is a collegial military regime that is focused on the maintenance of political stability, and Indonesia is a good example of this type, at least until the late twentieth century. Since then
Indonesia has been moving toward becoming a democratic system (Heady, 2001, pp. 330–335). Thefifth type is where a change occurs from being a traditional elite to a collegial bureaucratic elite regime without an intervening colonial period. This is characteristic for what happened in Afghanistan (1973), Ethiopia (1974), and Thailand (1997) (Heady, 2001, pp. 335–341).
There are, however, also examples of countries with this type of regime that had a colonial background and where continuity after independence was found in the administrative rather than in the political system (for instance, Ghana) (Heady, 2001, p. 341–346). Finally, sixth, there are the so-called pendulum systems of which the most significant feature of the political environment is that it swings between being a bureaucratic elite and polyarchal competitive regime. Examples include Brazil, Nigeria, and Turkey (Heady, 2001, pp. 346–358).