Presidents, Governments, and Parliaments. A Framework for Analysis of the Institutional Design of Contemporary Democracies. (original) (raw)

The democratic method offers a peculiar solution of one of the central problems of politics, which is the exercise of power by a leadership. Democracy makes the holders of the power accountable for their actions and decisions and fixes such accountability in a relatively rigid institutional framework made of roles, procedural resources and arenas of interaction among the roles. The institutional design of the democratic political systems has attracted much attention both from the legal and political perspective, because it affects the actual distribution of power among the political actors and the effectiveness of their decisions. The article reviews critically some of the most influential classifications of the democratic institutional design, with particular reference to the triangular interactions among Presidents, Governments, and Parliaments. Moving from the assumption that the arrangements among these three top political institutions identify the main patterns of the democratic government, the distinction among Parliamentary, Presidential, and Semi-Presidential systems set by the constitutional law is rejected and a new classification schema is advanced. In this new perspective the institutional design of democracy consists of institutional roles of authority, procedural resources attached to them and arenas of the interactions among the roles.