TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ganghof, Steffen
T1  - Is the "Constitution of Equality' Parliamentary, Presidential or Hybrid?
JF  - Political studies : the journal of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom
N2  - What does the value of political equality imply for the institutional design of democracies? The existing normative literature highlights the importance of proportional representation and legislative majority rule, but neglects the choice of an executive format. This paper explores two potential egalitarian trade-offs in this choice. First, while presidential systems tend to achieve too little bundling of separable decision-making issues (within political parties), parliamentary systems often tend towards too much bundling (between political parties), thus establishing informal veto positions in the democratic process. This is a trade-off between the adversarial' and deliberative' aspects of equality. Second, there is a trade-off between horizontal' and vertical' equality. Neither pure presidentialism nor pure parliamentarism may be able to maximise both dimensions of equality simultaneously. The paper argues that certain hybrids between parliamentarism and presidentialism have the potential to mitigate both trade-offs. These hybrids establish power separation between the executive and legislature without allowing for popular executive elections. The argument also has potential implications for the democratisation of the European Union.
KW  - equality
KW  - democratic theory
KW  - forms of government
KW  - institutional design
KW  - majority rule
Y1  - 2015
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.12124
SN  - 0032-3217
SN  - 1467-9248
VL  - 63
IS  - 4
SP  - 814
EP  - 829
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Hoboken
ER  - 
TY  - BOOK
A1  - Ganghof, Steffen
T1  - Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism
BT  - Democratic Design and the Separation of Powers
N2  - In a democracy, a constitutional separation of powers between the executive and the assembly may be desirable, but the constitutional concentration of executive power in a single human being is not. The book defends this thesis and explores ‘semi-parliamentary government’ as an alternative to presidential government. Semi-parliamentarism avoids power concentration in one person by shifting the separation of powers into the democratic assembly. The executive becomes fused with only one part of the assembly, even though the other part has at least equal democratic legitimacy and robust veto power on ordinary legislation. The book identifies the Australian Commonwealth and Japan, as well as the Australian states of New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia, as semi-parliamentary systems. Using data from 23 countries and 6 Australian states, it maps how parliamentary and semi-parliamentary systems balance competing visions of democracy; it analyzes patterns of electoral and party systems, cabinet formation, legislative coalition-building, and constitutional reforms; it systematically compares the semi-parliamentary and presidential separation of powers; and it develops new and innovative semi-parliamentary designs, some of which do not require two separate chambers.
KW  - presidential government
KW  - parliamentary government
KW  - semi-parliamentary government
KW  - separation of powers
KW  - executive personalism
KW  - bicameralism
KW  - constitutional design
KW  - democratic theory
KW  - patterns of democracy
KW  - Australia
Y1  - 2021
SN  - 978-0-19-289714-5
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192897145.001.0001
SP  - 1
EP  - 199
PB  - Oxford University Press
CY  - Oxford
ER  -