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  - JOUR
A1  - Ganghof, Steffen
T1  - Does public reason require super-majoritarian democracy? Liberty, equality, and history in the justification of political institutions
JF  - Politics, philosophy & economics
N2  - The project of public-reason liberalism faces a basic problem: publicly justified principles are typically too abstract and vague to be directly applied to practical political disputes, whereas applicable specifications of these principles are not uniquely publicly justified. One solution could be a legislative procedure that selects one member from the eligible set of inconclusively justified proposals. Yet if liberal principles are too vague to select sufficiently specific legislative proposals, can they, nevertheless, select specific legislative procedures? Based on the work of Gerald Gaus, this article argues that the only candidate for a conclusively justified decision procedure is a majoritarian or otherwise 'neutral' democracy. If the justification of democracy requires an equality baseline in the design of political regimes and if justifications for departure from this baseline are subject to reasonable disagreement, a majoritarian design is justified by default. Gaus's own preference for super-majoritarian procedures is based on disputable specifications of justified liberal principles. These procedures can only be defended as a sectarian preference if the equality baseline is rejected, but then it is not clear how the set of justifiable political regimes can be restricted to full democracies.
KW  - public-reason liberalism
KW  - democracy
KW  - coercion
KW  - political equality
KW  - majority rule
KW  - Gerald Gaus
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/1470594X12447786
SN  - 1470-594X
VL  - 12
IS  - 2
SP  - 179
EP  - 196
PB  - Sage Publ.
CY  - Thousand Oaks
ER  -