Presidents, Parliaments, & Good Government

Abstract

Presidents, Parliaments, & Good Government Sergio Fabbrini (bio) A “good government,” it is reasonable to assume, is one that can accomplish the essential executive tasks of 1) choosing and formulating policies in a way that expresses a clear symbolic direction, and 2) guaranteeing that those policies will receive effective implementation. In performing the former task, the executive must convey a sense of public purpose, forged through interaction with public opinion, that counteracts the inertia of well-organized minorities and other powerful interest groups. In performing the latter task, the executive must make its decisions “stick” in order to carry out coherent policies. Clearly, it is vital that an executive be capable of both symbolic coherence and effective implementation; the difficulty is that each task requires a distinct institutional process for its realization, and maintaining the two processes simultaneously within the same system is not easy. Effectiveness requires a government with majority support in the legislature to which it is accountable and an internally consistent program. The government should be stimulated and constrained by an opposition ready to step in with a program of its own should the incumbents lose the confidence of the voters. Symbolic coherence, on the other hand, requires the presence of a head of government who commands electoral legitimacy on his own account and can, if necessary, counter the conservative tendencies of his own legislative coalition and interest base when innovation and the addressing of new social demands are what is needed. Of course, these two analytical criteria of “good government” are more applicable to the institutional arrangements of competitive [End Page 128] democracies (where opposing parties alternate in government) than to those found in consensual or consociational democracies (where the government incorporates all the major parties through proportional representation [PR] and broad coalitions). A look at the countries of the democratic “West” (defined here as including Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and Japan) shows that all the consensual or consociational democracies use both electoral systems based on PR and bicameral parliaments to ensure a broad representation with room for all political options. These arrangements in turn generate strong incentives for multiparty, coalition governments. Because political parties—and hence governing coalitions—in consensual or consociational democracies are based on deep ethnic, communal, or ideological cleavages that they accept as unalterable, they tend to seek political stability first of all. The need to keep all of the coalition partners happy may take precedence over governmental effectiveness and symbolic coherence alike. In competitive democracies, on the other hand, stability is typically more assured because society is not divided by profound fault lines. Such democracies are usually spared the stark choice between stability and good government that democracies in divided societies are compelled to make. Italy before 1993 provided an extreme case of consensual parliamentary democracy. Thanks to intense ideological polarization, Italy had for almost all of the five decades after the close of the Second World War an endless round of leaderless, ineffectual governments. Not surprisingly, these governments were highly unstable; from 1945 to 1989, their average life span was just over a year. Yet there was an extraordinary stability and continuity of personnel at the highest levels, because the same centrist parties made up every ruling coalition. The only case that is comparable is that of the French Fourth Republic (1946–58), also a consensual parliamentary democracy, where the average government during the entire period between 1950 and 1958 lasted for just 8.6 months. No wonder that in Italy, a good government has been thought of as one that can last rather than one that can act. To eliminate the troublesome tendency to collapse “good government” into mere political stability, then, it is analytically preferable to discuss the question of good government with reference only to competitive democracies. If a “good” government is one that can in practice maximize both its symbolic coherence in the formulation of policy and its actual effectiveness in the implementation of policy, then I am led to conclude that each of the three institutional systems found in democracy (presidentialism, semipresidentialism, and parliamentarism) offers at best a partial and unsatisfactory institutional approximation of authentically good government. In the course of explaining why I am led...