Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism

Full Transcript:

Introduction:

Hello, and welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast, where it is my job to discuss democratic institutions. 

When we think of forms of government what first comes to mind are presidentialism and parliamentarism. Yet, what are the advantages and disadvantages of these systems and may there exist other forms of government that combine the benefits of both systems – ensuring the separation of powers and avoiding executive personalism? One answer is semi-parliamentarism.

With Steffen Ganghof I discuss his recent book “Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism:  Democratic Design and the Separation of Powers” in which he studies and examines semi-parliamentarism in great detail. Steffen Ganghof explains what motivated him to write the book and why he thinks political scientists should spend more time on design thinking – exploring alternatives to current democratic systems in use. He elaborates on how semi-parliamentarism assigns the two parliamentary chambers specific functions, making the first chamber to hold government to account, while enabling the second chamber to solve complex legislative questions.

Steffen Ganghof is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Potsdam in Germany. He completed his doctoral thesis at the University Bremen and his habilitation at the University Cologne. He has published in many leading journals such as Comparative Political Studies and the Journal of European Public Policy, among many others, and written two books prior to Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism. You can find the link to his website in the show notes.

I am very happy and grateful to have him on the show. 

I am your host, Stephan Kyburz, and this is the sixteenth episode of The Rules of the Game podcast. I am a political economist with a PhD in Economics from the University of Bern in Switzerland. And I previously held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Center for Global Development.

You find a full transcript of the conversation on my website rulesofthegame.blog. If you this podcast, please leave a review on your preferred platform and share it with friends and colleagues. 

Now please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Steffen Ganghof.

Interview 

Stephan Kyburz: Steffen Ganghof, welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast, I’m very happy to have you on the show.

Steffen Ganghof: Thanks, thanks for having me, happy to be here.

Stephan Kyburz: As usual I ask the first kind of personal question which is what is your first memory of democracy?

Steffen Ganghof: So for me I’m not sure it’s my first memory but it’s definitely the most important memory for me, was so when I was in high school I got very concerned about environmental issues, climate change and so on, which is a little bit frustrating because it’s a long time ago. And nothing really has changed. But so I got very active in environmental organizations and that scaled up quickly. So after high school I was basically for 2 years, I was a full time campaigner and activist and educator in this environmental movement. And what was striking for me was not only how we sort of interacted as an organization or as a movement with a democratic state but also internally this organization I was working tried to have a very radical reform of its own organization, very decentralized, very democratic. Which in my view completely backfired. So the effort to become a very decentralized open, inclusive organization ended up concentrating a lot of power in those people that really knew how the organization worked. Which were actually the paid people who were supposed to be controlled by the unpaid people and that really was something that deeply bothered me. So that’s actually why I think, I would have studied something else and then after this experience I started studying sociology and I studied organization theory, like Herbert Simon and stuff, because I really wanted to understand how organizations work and how institutions work and how that can happen. And so that basically set me on the path to becoming a sort of institution focused political scientist.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, that’s very interesting. So it’s usually I think, also in my experience, that people have a certain event or a certain experience that makes them study something specific because they think: oh this is kind of bothering and I want to understand why this is happening, right? So obviously for me also the institutional questions are crucial and also I only after a while really started to realize that actually the institutions are so important in terms of organization and what outcome that leads to. So now we want to move on to the discussion of your very recent book which is called “Beyond presidentialism and parliamentarism” and what I would like to know is when did that motivation to write that book emerge and what motivated you really then to start and move beyond these terms of just presidentialism and parliamentarism and write on semi-parliamentarism. Where did that motivation come from?

Steffen Ganghof: So before I answer that question if I may, I just want to mention that the book is open access, which is not usually the case. So listeners who might want to read up on some of the stuff that we are going to talk about, they can just go to the homepage of Oxford University Press for the book and they will find an icon where they can just download the PDF.

Stephan Kyburz: Of course, I will link to the book in the show notes.

Steffen Ganghof: Yes, great. Sort of the book really brings together a lot of research in different areas actually that I’ve done over the years so in a sense this book has been long in coming. But the reason why I eventually decided to write this book or to bring it all together in the book, there are two main reasons. One is more general, one one is more specific. The general reason is in a sense already the one that you sort of hinted at in your question which is that I think there is – for my taste at least – there’s a little bit or too little design thinking in political science. So political scientists are really interested in understanding the world causally, understanding cause and effects in the world. You know how the world is, the way it is. And that’s important of course, very important, but in my view, the reason why we seek causal knowledge is that we try to change the world or try to, you know, intervene in the world and and come up with solutions also just not only explain sort of how we get here. But also how we might change things. And so yeah, it always bothered me. So in my view, a lot of people seem to think that the three basic constitutions are that we have in the democratic world, the parliamentary, the presidential and the semi-presidential. This is somehow all there is, or that somehow the underlying assumption seems to be that history is efficient and it will lead us to the solutions that are the best solutions. But I don’t think that fits what we know about history. History isn’t efficient. History is path dependent and these systems evolved out of the system that were there before, out of monarchy basically. And they reflect power structures at the time that they were developed and they reflect sort of ideas and some of these ideas were just wrong. We know today that they’re wrong. 

So that’s precisely what bothers me is that for example, now in a country like Chile where you know, in the few moments when a window of opportunity opens up that we can change maybe constitutions, I think then people start to think about maybe alternatives. But if political science and constitutional theory has not worked out certain things systematically before, you know you cannot ad hoc come up with new solutions. So the natural tendency is to always go back to the same solutions. Which is again what happens in Chile now, right? Presidentialism, parliamentarism or semi-presidentialism.

And so I think at least in theory, it’s plausible or possible that there might be better systems and so I think political science should work on them a little bit more systematically. So that’s sort of been an idea, a general idea. I think I wanted to write a book which is not only, you know, explanatory work but also tries to think about new designs. And the second more specific reason, I’m entering this debate about presidentialism and parliamentarism or this debate, and you had a podcast about this before, has often been framed as a debate about the perils of presidentialism. So much of this debate was about the famous work of Juan Linz who had these arguments that there is something inherently wrong with presidential systems. And there was also the assumption that the sort of the natural solution is to go to parliamentary systems. And now with Trump and you know all these problems that various presidential systems have, this sort of reasoning has become very prominent again. And I want to say that since the work of Juan Linz, I think the political science literature has learned a lot, has made a lot of progress. So I think this and also this debate has in useful ways I think moved a little bit away from Linz and also moved a little bit away from the issues that motivated Linz. But my feeling was and is that still this debate is a little a bit less productive than it could be, and the reason is – to just anticipate the argument a little bit – sort of presidentialism in my view has two main features and Linz’s view was that both of these features are bad. And my view is that only one of these features is bad and if we get rid of this one feature, then the other can be more of a solution than a problem. So what are these two features and then I’m going to stop. So one of these features is the separation of powers, right? So the separation of powers simply means under presidentialism, voters elect two branches separately, the executive branch and the legislative branch. And these two branches are independent from one another to some extent. That’s simply the separation of powers. But the other feature of presidentialism is that one of these two branches is a single human being, right? The president, the executive branch in a presidential system, is just one person which I think in a pluralist complex big society is quite an interesting feature, right? That you would concentrate so much power in a single human being, and it’s important to understand this. So the reason why the presidential system personalizes power, because you elect a single person. You don’t elect, in a parliamentary system you elect an assembly or you give power to parties and then they choose certain persons but under presidentialism you elect directly. The constitution authorizes a person and this person cannot be removed by a party or by an assembly in a normal political procedure, in a majoritarian procedure. You only have these extraordinary procedures like an impeachment. So these two features together you authorize a person and this person is really hard to get rid of by anyone. This is why it personalizes power. The argument that I try to develop in the book is that – in my view and this differs a little bit from Linzian critique – is that the problem of presidentialism is this second aspect. What I call executive personalism. This power concentration in a single person. And the idea is that if you could get rid of personalistic element, than the separation of powers is giving voters the option to elect two different institutions, actually has also a lot of advantages. So that’s where I differ a little and this also means, so when colleagues sort of pursue this Linzian argument, they naturally think that well when, and you had a podcast on this, so the idea would be well to change a presidential system, the obvious solution is to go to a parliamentary system, right? And that’s how the debate is usually in the United States or in Chile now, and maybe they consider a semi-presidential system. But sort of one side says well everyone should have a parliamentary system. And sort of my book or my argument or my perspective leads to a little bit a different conclusion: I would say that there are good reasons to have a separation of powers. Maybe the more realistic and feasible alternative to a presidential system would not be a parliamentary system, but it would be a different separation of power system, one that focuses on getting rid of this personalistic element.

Stephan Kyburz: And that’s what exactly we’re gonna talk about in this podcast. We want elaborate a bit more of the details and the problems of pure parliamentarism as well. And just before I go to that point I want to quickly just reply to your first point. The design thinking that you mentioned and I think actually that’s also one motivation for my podcast, that I think we should discuss more alternative systems like you do in the book as well. And because, as you say, that the solutions they should be ready when there is a window of opportunity and that’s why also I think political scientists or constitutional researchers should have these solutions kind of ready, or what does it mean, for example, what would the US look like in a parliamentary system or what would direct democracy look like in Nigeria? You know, like to have these alternatives ready on the table when they are needed. Because exactly as you say in the Chilean case, maybe more preparation would also lead to different solutions, right? If those solutions were, I mean solutions or propositions maybe more, would be on the table then the discussion could go in different directions. And that’s why I think your book is so valuable because it kind of pushes the boundaries in a different direction, to think more about what does semi-parliamentarism mean? And because semi-presidentialism, as you say, is like quite common, it is implemented in many countries. So as you say, we know that presidential systems, they are often criticized. The criticism is quite well known and then the alternative is usually to go to parliamentarism. But you take it like a step further and you really criticize parliamentarism. And so what are the main problems that you see with parliamentarism?

Steffen Ganghof: Yes, Okay, yeah, that’s an important question. So and I want to make clear, so my point is not to criticize parliamentary systems. In fact, sometimes people get this wrong. So I really remain sort of undecided. I don’t argue that semi-parliamentary systems are better than parliamentary systems. So I remain undecided in the book. What I do say is that the colleagues that say well presidentialism is bad and everyone should just do a parliamentary system. They fail to see that the people that defend presidential systems also have a point, right? And that explains why they’re so resistant to just go to a parliamentary system and that’s why it’s important to understand the problems of a parliamentary system. So what are these problems? So for me the core institution of a parliamentary system is a vote of no confidence, right? The ability of parliament to in a normal majoritarian political vote, to get rid of the chief executive, right? So the prime minister is always just an agent of the party or an agent of the assembly majority and he or she can be replaced basically at any time. So I think this no confidence vote is a really important, good invention of democracy. It’s one of the crucial inventions of democratic systems. However, the pure parliamentary system gives this confidence power to the entire assembly, right? So every member of the assembly has the same formal power over the cabinet. You know every vote counts potentially as a vote against the cabinet and that’s a problem because it means that whatever complexity you have in the assembly – you know if you have many parties, many conflicts, you know anti-system parties – whatever complexity you get in the assembly in parliament, tends to be translated into complexity in government. Okay, this is important because we see this all over the parliamentary world, right? What we see is, we have systems like Israel or Spain where we had several elections in a year because it was impossible to build governments. You have governments with very many parties like in the Netherlands, you know with 4 to 8 parties, Netherlands, Israel, you have systems where it takes extremely long to even build governments. Like for example the Netherlands have recently, in this month, inaugurated a government where the election was last March.

Stephan Kyburz: Or it can even fail, right?

Steffen Ganghof: Yes, and it can fail. It takes a long time and we have a general trend in the parliamentary system that because there’s a general trend all over democracy that we have more fragmentation of parliaments, more parties, more conflict, more polarization. And in parliamentary systems all of this complexity, and difficulty in parliaments is being translated into the government. And that creates problems for example even if you’re able to create a government like look at Germany. So for a long time we had a grand coalition that nobody wanted and now we had an election where you know two parties on the left and two parties on right had like a pretty antagonistic campaign. But then, now they have this traffic light coalition where one party of the right has to have a coalition with two parties on the left. And so we already know that there are a lot of issues that are completely absent from the coalition contract. Essentially so there will be nothing done about income redistribution, in tax policy or social policy, essentially in many areas nothing will get done. So that’s a problem that – in sort of in a nutshell – in a parliamentary system if you have a more complex parliament, it’s very difficult for voters to make a clear choice. You know for the next four years I want to go in this direction I want to make climate change a priority, I want to reduce taxes, I want to increase taxes, these sort of more general directions for the government are really difficult to achieve.

Stephan Kyburz: But would you agree that you kind of want that complexity in parliament because for example, if you have a more proportional system, right, you will end up with more parties but also that probably reflect better the preferences of the voters, or resemble the society in parliament. So for the representation of interests in parliament, you also kind of want that complexity. But you don’t want it to translate over into government because you want to have a stable government and often, for example, a fragmentation in the assembly translates into unstable governments. Would you agree with that general view?

Steffen Ganghof: Yes, I think that’s right and that’s exactly the reason why a separation of powers might be attractive. But on the other end, so I’m not arguing, so I think you’re right, but also I mean of course in the end all of these systems have to deal with the same problems, right? So I’m not saying that parliamentary systems cannot maneuver this landscape. So what parliamentary systems, successful parliamentary systems do, is to find some sort of sweet spot, some medium to allow for some degree of complexity, some degree of multiparty, but find ways to still manufacture majorities. And there are different ways to do this right to have some degree of disproportionality in the electoral system or to give some parties or coalitions a bonus. There are different solutions within parliamentary systems and that’s an interesting question. So I’m not arguing that these solutions are necessarily worse than the ones that are possibly going to talk about later. But I just want to say that finding a solution under parliamentarism to balance sort of the stability of government and the ability of voters to make a clear choice with the very important goal of having a representative, inclusive parliament, finding this balance under parliamentarism is really difficult. And that’s just my point and that explains why the separation of powers is interesting as a constitutional structure.

Stephan Kyburz: And countries really struggle with finding that right balance, right? Between for example, putting voting thresholds to have fewer parties or yeah, maybe making the system less proportional so that you end up with only a few blocks in the parliament that can more easily form a government. So I really see this problem and this struggle of parliamentarism to find the balance. So you are saying actually the separation of power is an interesting element of separating the government from parliament. So in a semi-parliamentary system, how is that really implemented? So can you explain, what are the characteristics of a semi-parliamentary system?

Steffen Ganghof: I’ll answer this in a second – but maybe it’s good to first mention the two general advantages of the separation of powers. 

Stephan Kyburz: Okay, sure, go ahead.

Steffen Ganghof: These are the two advantages in a way that also apply to presidential systems. And then in a second step I think then we can say what are the differences to a presidential system. So I think the two advantages of a presidential system or of the separation of powers is, first, if you have two elected branches, if you elect two branches separately, you can simply have two different electoral systems, right? So in a presidential system, you know you can elect the parliament, the assembly with a proportional system as we just said, to have this representativeness. And of course presidential elections are by their nature majoritarian, right? So they give voters a clear choice between different candidates. In presidential systems you also have pre-electoral coalitions. So some parties group together under one candidate and another group of parties group together for another candidate. So you have this clear choice. So in a way, the presidential system can give you both the proportional option and this majoritarian option. That’s one advantage. And the other advantage is because the parliament does not have a no confidence vote, because it doesn’t have to keep the government in office, it’s actually liberated in a sense, to deliberate on specific pieces of legislation more freely. Because what happens in the parliamentary system for the reason we discussed, in a parliamentary system, one of the most important priorities for a government would always, must always be to be stable, right? So the standard solution to be stable is to build a sort of cartel, if you want to say it in economic terms. So now, for example, the traffic light coalition in Germany, you see there are three parties and they form a cartel in the sense that we say we do veto players, so none of us can do anything without the other. And we’re not allowed to build coalitions with other parties in  the legislature, right? And that’s also, I mean this might be inefficient because they block each other and some people think it’s not particularly democratic because it means there might be majorities in parliament for certain measures that cannot be passed because one of these actors doesn’t want it. Or it could be that one of these actors, which is part of the cartel, one of the veto players in order to make a decision they have to make a log roll, a sort of like a trade. So one of these parties maybe get something that a clear majority in parliament does not like. So in a sense this cartel politics that we have under parliamentarism can also be seen as problematic. And you know this from Switzerland because Switzerland also has a sort of separation of power system, a different one but in Switzerland also you can get different bills, different legislation passed with different coalitions. So there is more flexibility. 

Stephan Kyburz: It’s more issue based really.

Steffen Ganghof: It’s more issue based and some people believe, or some authors believe that this issue based decision making has some attractive features. So these are the two main examples I think. You can mix two electoral systems and you can have more of this flexible decision making. And that’s true for both presidential systems and semi-parliamentary systems. So what I argue is that, as we said in a presidential system, I pay for these advantages by having this amazing power concentration in a single human being. That’s what I call executive personalism. So now if you think about what I just said, so if you want to think about how does a semi-parliamentary system look? So we said two things. First, the problem of a presidential system is that it doesn’t have any no confidence vote, right? So there’s no, there’s no way to get rid of the chief executive by some assembly or some party. And we’ve said in a parliamentary system, the problem is that the entire parliament has this no confidence vote, which means that the complexity of parliament is translated into government. So the solution if you view it this way, the logical solution is to say: well, divide the parliament in two parts. In the easiest case this will be two chambers. But as I explain in the book, we don’t have to get into it here, it doesn’t have to be two chambers, it could be a committee and a chamber, but the easiest way is two chambers. So you divide parliament and you say one of these two parts, both of these parts are directly elected, and one of these parts has a no confidence vote against the government. So it means and instead it means one of these chambers is just really a legislative chamber, one of the chambers of parliament as we know it in a sense. And the other chamber is a sort of confidence chamber. So one chamber has the task of selecting the government, selecting the chief executive and can remove the chief executive by a confidence vote and the other part is completely separated. The other part has no no confidence vote. And I think in this way, you get the two advantages that we talked about. So again, you can elect the two chambers under different rules. So the legislative chamber, which is about controlling the government and making legislation, this chamber should be elected under proportional rules and the other part could really be designed to mimic a presidential election. So in the other part, in this confidence chamber, you could and should use majoritarian rules. Because there the goal is to really allow voters to make a clear choice between let’s say center-right government and the center-left. And that’s an important point in the book that I argue that this confidence chamber, it could actually be designed that from the perspectives of voters, it looks like a presidential election, right? You have candidates, you have parties aligning with these candidates and the camp that wins will elect the chief or select the chief executive. So from the perspective of voters, nothing really changes. Because they know, because that’s the thing like, the important thing about presidential systems is what political scientists call identifiability: that voters are directly able to select the government, right? That there’s no pre-post-electoral bargaining, no like backroom decision making, but that voters can directly determine who the government is. So I think that this is also possible under a semi-parliamentary system. So it looks like a presidential election. But there’s no personalization, parties are always in control. They select who their candidate is and they can also, you know, if they have a Trump, if they have a complete lunatic who wants to set the world on fire, then they can just get rid of this person and replace him or her by another person.

Stephan Kyburz: And which I think is really interesting is that one chamber is really separated in the sense that it is responsible for legislative tasks, right? And I really like this idea in the sense that one chamber really can have this complexity also and resolve these legislative tasks without interfering with government.

Steffen Ganghof: I mean that’s a really important point and I can elaborate on this a little. I mean this is part of the logic of the system. The proportional part has to be the separated part, right? The part that does not have to keep the government in power and that’s absolutely crucial. Because we said the problem of parliamentary systems is that this complexity of parliaments of proportional parliaments, multi-party parliaments translates into government. So the proportional part of the system should be the separated part of the system. So think about it this way: I mean this is maybe helpful also for the listeners. So the structure I described is a structure where one of the two chambers – so both chambers are directly elected, which means both chambers have the same democratic legitimacy. Okay, that’s important because that’s actually really rare. Most bicameral systems have a structure where the first chamber is clearly more democratic and the second chamber for various reasons is less democratic. And that’s why the bicameral, the literature on bi-cameralism in political science talks about a lot of other things. But that’s not what I’m talking about. There are very few systems where the second chamber and the first chamber are really equal in terms of democratic legitimacy. Okay, and then if you have this, if you have both chambers with equal legitimacy then what you’re basically saying is one of these chambers relates to the government as in a parliamentary system, namely the first chamber: it elects a government and can remove the government. And the other chamber relates to the government as it would be in a presidential system: it doesn’t select the government and cannot remove the government. That’s exactly why the semi-parliamentary label is apt, because you have two parts of parliament and they relate to the government differently.

Stephan Kyburz: So just to understand really, so what you call the first chamber is also the upper chamber, what we usually call the upper chamber. Is that right?

Steffen Ganghof: The systems that I’m talking about, and it’s a very small set, it’s a very specific system. I’m only talking about systems where they’re absolutely equal in terms of legitimacy. The only difference I consider in the book, but that’s a footnote, is that – I mean there’s a lot of talk now about having sortition chambers, so randomly selected chambers –  argument in political theory would be that randomly selected chambers are even more democratic than elected chambers. So you could even imagine – and I talk about this – there are proposals for a kind of semi-parliamentary system where the second chamber is actually randomly selected. So then this would be sort of the more democratic chamber. But I do try to avoid this terminology. That’s why I call it first and second, but first and second says nothing about hierarchy because there is no hierarchy and that is really absolutely crucial for my argument. Because you see, and a lot of people say “oh no, it’s just a parliamentary system with a strong second chamber”, but the reason why we consider most bicameral countries as just parliamentary is that we know that the first chamber is the only democratically legitimate chamber, and that’s why we define the system of government based on this chamber, okay? But if both chambers are really equals in terms of democratic legitimacy, then you cannot do this, right? Because you know you could, you look at one chamber and say “oh it’s parliamentary” and then you look at the other chamber and say “oh no, it’s presidential”, because this chamber has no no confidence vote. So I’m saying yes because it’s neither parliamentary nor presidential. That’s why I call it semi-parliamentary, because you have two equal chambers that relate differently to the government.

Stephan Kyburz: I think it makes really sense to call them first and second chamber and not upper and lower because you want to kind of not have this hierarchy, right? They just have different functions. They have different functions in legislating and supporting the government.

Steffen Ganghof: And another way to think about it I mean think of it like the president in a presidential system is also a chamber in a way. It’s just a chamber with one person continuously giving confidence to himself or herself. That’s all it is. Because remember, executives in democratic systems, are not only executives, they have very strong legislative powers, right? They have veto powers. They have agenda powers. So a president is a chamber, a presidential system with two chambers of parliament has effectively three chambers, but one chamber is just a one person chamber. And that’s really what I’m just saying, the executive branch is a one person chamber that should be a proper chamber.

Stephan Kyburz: And would you agree in that sense that in a presidential system, you know, at least in the U.S. it’s the case that the Senate is responsible for impeachment, right? Would you say that your first chamber that can remove the government is like an impeachment but made much easier because they continuously control the government and can remove it any time without any legal reason, there are just political reasons. They can remove the government.

Steffen Ganghof: Exactly, and I think that’s a very important point and I talk about this quite extensively in the last chapter of my book, because I think the evidence shows that impeachment procedures are really, really problematic. And I think it’s really important if you read the work of someone like Adam Przeworski, right? He says the way democracy works is that democracy settles who is in power and democracy tries to bring all the conflicts in society into the institutions, right? You don’t want to have conflicts out of the institutions you want to have them settled in the institutions. It should be clear who legitimately got power and who didn’t. Now the problem with impeachment procedures is that, with an impeachment procedure you try to always have this problem that the side that defends the president argues, you’re just making up charges, right? Because you lost the last election and you want to reconfigure the power structure, right? And the other side says well you’re defending a president who clearly you know should be impeached. Sort of you’re turning every impeachment procedure, you’re reopening the general power structure. Because everyone knows, the president’s side knows, if the president is impeached, it’s gonna hurt our side altogether, right? And so what a lot of people, what scholars, colleagues on Latin America have found, and Linz also argued this already, that these impeachment procedures always tend to lead to sort of a constitutional crisis. You know when Rousseff in Brazil was impeached, some people started to call it a sort of coup, they stretched the concept of a coup and said it was a sort of legal coup in a way. So it actually often is traumatizing for countries. Whereas a no confidence vote, that is an important point, a no confidence vote does not necessarily have to change the power structure. Because the side that won the last election can stay in power. For example, take Britain right now. If the conservative party decides to remove the prime minister because of all the “party stuff” at Downing Street, you know, they are easily able to do it and replace him with another prime minister in the hope of increasing their chances in the next election. So they can do it rather easily without losing power or without necessarily hurting themselves. They might hurt themselves more by leaving him in office. So this is why I think the no confidence vote is actually sort of a better solution to keep democracies stable or to not let conflicts escalate.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, so it keeps the government accountable on a more stable basis, right? And it strengthens this principal agent relationship whereas the chamber is the principal and the agent is the government. And, as you say, in the impeachment case, the impeachment is a legal tool, a legal procedure but it’s always politicized, right? In the end, as we saw also in the U.S.. 

Steffen Ganghof: And this is an important point. So this personalization that I’m talking about, might actually lead to a reversal of this principle-agent relationship. And there’s this important book by David Samuels and Matthew Shugart where they use this notion of presidentialized parties. So they argue that presidential systems and semi-presidential systems, parties tend to get presidentialized. And Trump of course is a good example, because the Republican, many people in the Republican party wanted to avoid Trump at all costs, right? But once he got the office of the presidency, he basically turned the Republican party into his own party. And so this party also defended him in the impeachment. So in a sense the principal-agent relationship is even reversed, right? So the agent, that the party becomes the agent of the president rather than the president being the agent of the party and this is exactly, so I would argue, the structure of presidentialism, this executive personalism creates presidentialized parties as they would call it and that’s quite a problem for democracy.

Maybe because we were sidetracked a little, I wanted to make one more comment because you asked me about the structure of the two chambers. I think there’s one, I want to emphasize, one more point. So because we said what are the general advantages of separation of power. So in the semi-parliamentary system, because the second chamber is elected under proportional representation, right? The government will usually not have a majority there, right? So the government will have to find majorities in the second chamber. And as we said the government is usually able to do this in a more flexible way, issue-specific majorities on different issues and if you have a good majoritarian electoral system for the first chamber, the likelihood is pretty high that the government, the position of the government is located sort of in the center of the political space, which makes it rather easy to build this coalition and I want to make one point here. Because one argument that people often have against this issue-specific decision making is that you know, it costs a lot of energy, it costs a lot of transaction costs. As you know in parliamentary systems, a lot of people are advocating for minority governments and the counter argument, this is really very costly to find these majorities. But I just want to say that, again if we switch to design thinking, and see what is possible in the world, I just want to point to the example of Denmark. Like Denmark is a parliamentary system with the tradition of minority governments and what they do, for example, is that they do not have to always work out always legislative coalitions for each bill. But what they do is: they say you know environmental policy is going to be governed partly by a set of parties, partly by parties in government, partly by parties in the opposition and they just make a deal which is called Forlig or political accommodation. So they basically say in this policy in this policy area this set of parties is going to govern together, in another policy area this set of parties is going to govern together. So you kind have a mixture, you can have different majorities in different issue areas but you can still have these majorities in a longer term perspective and in these sort of arrangements it’s even possible that the opposition parties in a sense, they become part of the government coalition in these policy areas. So they might get particular access to the executive, they might be briefed, they might actually go into the ministries and departments and get information. So you can imagine a sort of separation of power systems where you have some flexibility but you also have a very predictable long-term process.

Stephan Kyburz: Moving on still to the last question I have. So you know presidential, parliamentary and also semi-presidential systems are quite common. Semi-parliamentary systems are less common. Nonetheless they do exist in more pure or less pure form. So in the book you mention Australia, you mentioned Japan. Can you explain or describe how semi-parliamentarism is implemented in these countries and what are the experiences with it?

Steffen Ganghof: So I classify these countries as semi-parliamentary because as I said they have directly elected second chambers. But these second chambers do not have a no confidence vote against the government. This is an important combination. And this combination is actually quite rare. It only exists in Japan and in Australia. Because and that’s important, for example in a country like Italy or Romania, the second chamber is also directly elected. In Italy there are also a few, very few unelected, they’re basically directly elected. But in these systems the second chamber also has a no confidence vote, right? So the logic of a parliamentary system is extended to them. So if you look at this combination of directly elected but no no confidence vote, you’ll only find Japan and Australia. Now Japan I don’t look at. I mean I have it in my book, but Japan basically uses some type of mixed-proportional representation system or mixed majoritarian system in both chambers. So it doesn’t really use the structure in the way that I’m interested in. The interesting way to use this structure is to have the first chamber elected on a majoritarian basis and the second chamber on a proportional basis. And this is what we find in Australia.

These systems are rare but that’s the best we can do, right? So I characterize these systems: how the electoral systems work, how the party systems work. And I look empirically if what I think they should be able to do, namely balance these different goals, that are more difficult to balance under parliamentarism, whether they can balance them in a different way, right? And this is what I find. So these two things that I want from such a system: that voters can use the first chamber to make a clear choice. Do I want a left government, do I want a right government? And they can use the second chamber to have more variety of parties, allowing new parties to enter. And it forces the government to, in order to pass legislation, they have to make deals, right? So in a sense you have a stable government but it has to act like a minority government in the second chamber. And this combination to have an identifiability government who builds flexible coalitions in a proportional system, in a proportional second chamber, that combination is simply impossible in a parliamentary system. And I show empirically that this is what these systems can do and then I look at how they solve deadlocks, how they deal with problems between the two chambers. Basically just to show that these systems actually work and this structure is quite attractive. But then I also say, you know, because these systems developed in a path dependent manner, they were not designed from scratch with the kind of blueprint in mind that I have in mind. They’re not optimally designed, so that’s why there’s a chapter in the book where I say, well if you were to design these systems from scratch how you would do that. And how you would make them more attractive as an alternative to a presidential system.

Stephan Kyburz: So for anybody who wants to go more into detail, to understand better the structure, I can strongly recommend the book and as I said I will link to it in the show notes. Do you have any other books or articles that you can recommend to the audience?

Steffen Ganghof: So for me about the general presidentialism and parliamentarism debate, there are two really important books, that were important for my thinking, that I think are really important for the debate. So one is a book by José Cheibub from 2007, Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and Democracy I think is the title and that book’s really important. It’s sort of the main, it was a main attack of the Linzian view in a way, it was sort of the counter-argument to Linz. And I think it’s a really important book, especially for those who tend towards the Linzian view, because I mean you have to take Cheibub’s arguments very seriously. I mean he’s a major voice in this debate and he knows all these three systems really well. He’s done cutting edge, original research on parliamentary systems and semi-presidential systems and presidential systems, and I think more than most scholars he understands that similar systems pop-up in all of these systems in different ways. So I think he’s the one who most prominently pushed back against this Linzian view and I think it’s important to take these arguments very, very seriously. So the second book I’d recommend and which was very important for my own thinking is the book that I already mentioned by David Samuels and Matthew Shugart, I forget the title, something with presidents and prime ministers I think is the title, from 2010. And what they do is that they look at how different forms of government, especially parliamentary government, presidential government and semi-presidential government influence parties or they shape parties. And I think this book is really very important because it explains why the choice of the form of government is perhaps the most basic choice a democracy has to make, because the kind of parties you’re going to get will determine all the other choices you can make, right? You’re going to have a very different democracy with representative disciplined parties or other kinds of parties.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, so quickly the book is called Presidents parties and Prime Ministers How the separation of powers affects party organization and behavior and I link to that of course in the show notes.

Steffen Ganghof: So in a sense this is a sort of a book which again defends Linz I think, in some ways, in some aspects and exactly the kind of aspects that I’m focusing on too, like what I call executive personalism. They show, for example, as do other studies, that presidential systems – as Linz hypothesized – has a greater tendency to allow outcomers or outsiders or newcomers like Trump to come in and that these sort of outsiders and newcomers create lots of problems for democracy. So the final recommendation I would just give to people that are interested in presidentialism, I think it’s really important to understand how presidentialism emerged from monarchy. And how many of the people that sort of designed these systems were quite happy with the idea of just having elected kings. That’s all they wanted and there’s a really nice older paper by William Scheuermann whom I also cite in the book, I think it’s from 2005, on the monarchical origins of presidentialism in the U.S. And then there is a more comparative paper, I think from 2013, but you can find them in the book, from Josep Colomer who also takes a Latin American experience into account. But again showing how strong sort of this legacy of monarchy is in presidential systems.

Okay, and on semi-parliamentarism and one I would recommend a paper published an article published last year in the Canadian Journal of compare and contemporary law, by colleague of mine, Tarunabh Kaitan who is a law professor at Oxford, and this paper on the one hand, it shows that I’m not the only one who thinks about semi-parliamentary systems, and defends these kind of systems. So he has a very similar proposal to me. But the other thing that’s really nice about this system, that he also has this sort of design perspective. You know he’s a constitutional lawyer, very interested in constitutional design, and this paper really shows how you think about constitutional design from first principles. So he starts with parties, starts with the idea of what kind of parties do you want to have in a democracy and then he derives certain principles from that and then he thinks through how you would design a system and then he ends up with a semi-parliamentary system, which he calls moderated parliamentarianism. And there’s not to say, I mean I have disagreements with Tarunabh, we don’t agree on everything. There’s actually also a debate one can find online that was organized by the International Association of Constitutional Law. So a number of scholars, also José Cheibub and others, have commented on Tarunabh’s article. So that’s a very interesting debate because it shows you sort of different perspectives on this constitutional design problem and this can easily be found online. But I think what Tarunabh and I would agree with, we’re not saying we have figured this out, we’re probably wrong in some issues and we have to learn more. We’re just saying that more people should think about this stuff and should be engaged.

Steffen Ganghof: Yes, and the last thing I would just maybe plug also. So one thing that I would recommend that will come out this year, two colleagues from University College London, Richard Belly and Jeff King, are editing an excellent volume “The Cambridge Handbook of Constitutional Theory” with Cambridge University Press, which has really assembled an excellent group of scholars who analyze, sort of look at everything constitutional theory, in all areas and I had the pleasure and honor to write the chapter on this presidentialism-parliamentarism debate. So in a sense this will give sort of a shorter summary of the debate and also my own perspective and this will need some time to come out, but I will also put it on ResearchGate soon. So if people don’t want to look at the whole book, they might want to check out this chapter, but also I think the entire volume will be immensely valuable.

Stephan Kyburz: Cool. Yeah, thanks a lot for these recommendations, sounds all fascinating and a lot of interesting reading coming up for sure also for me. So I think for the moment we leave it at that. It has been a very interesting conversation even though it’s not always simple to explain these concepts, but I think it has been tremendously interesting. And Steffen, I really thank you for taking your time and I can really recommend the book to anyone, so I will link to all these resources also in the show notes of course.

Steffen Ganghof: Well thanks a lot for having me and for your interest in the book and this work and generally for the work you do with the podcast. I mean, as is obvious, I think it’s really important for us to think about institutions and how we can make them better.

Stephan Kyburz: Cool. Thanks a lot.

Outro:

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