Political performance and types of democracy: Findings from comparative studies

Abstract

This essay explores the relationships between political performance profiles and major types of democracy from a comparative perspective. The article focuses attention mainly on the political performance of majoritarian and non-majoritarian government, democracies with small and large numbers of veto players, hybrid regimes, presidentialism and parliamentary government, referendum democracy and representative government, and established as apposed to partial democracies. The findings point to relatively robust and significant patterns of relationships between performance and type of democracy. Types of democracy are important constraints and represent at the same time enabling conditions of policy choices. However, a caveat must be added: types of democracy do not determine policy choices and they also do not determine the outcome of these choices.

Which type of democracy performs best?

“…The conventional wisdom was that majoritarian systems were better at policy formulation and implementation, and governing, while non-majoritarian democracies were better at integrating opponents, and representing minorities (Schmidt 2002, Doorenspleet 2005). The idea was that political elites in new democracies must decide whether the effectiveness of the government is more or less important than the representation of minority groups in the society when they choose and design the type of system.…”

“…In the same year, Italy abandoned the list-PR system in favor of a more majoritarian system (see Renwick 2008;Shugart and Wattenberg 2001;Katz 2001), while more recently, Ireland moved away from a majoritarian system (Bulsara and Kissane 2009; see also Anderson 2009 andSinardet 2010 on Belgium). 5 The debate over the pros and cons of various institutional arrangements has not only been expressed in political practice, but has also been dealt with in the academic literature (Rose 1992;Castles 1994;Crepaz 1996aCrepaz , 1996bBlais and Carty 1996;Linz 2000;Schmidt 2002;Taagepera 2003;Ganghof 2005;Fortin 2008;Aarts and Thomassen 2008;Müller-Rommel 2008;Vatter 2009;Flinders 2010;Sinardet 2010;Vatter and Bernauer 2011).…”

The Good Cause: Theoretical Perspectives on Corruption

“…parent manner. Weaver and Rockman and their colleagues (1996), for example, provided an extensive analysis of the differences in performance between presidential and parliamentary political systems (see also the discussion of Schmidt (2002) below). These analyses have been concerned more with the capacity of these systems to make and deliver policy rather than with their capacity to do so in a non-corrupt manner.…”

Political Exclusion and the Lack of Democratisation: Cross-National Evaluation of Nepali Institutions using a Majoritarian–Consensus Framework

“…The consensus model incorporates institutions such as federalism and proportional electoral systems that have been established as inclusive (Cohen, 1997;Schmidt, 2002). Hence the majoritarian-consensus framework can be adapted to assess inclusive/exclusionary characteristics of polities.…”