Institutional Checks Research Articles

Assessing the Trump Presidency on Its Own Terms

AbstractSome scholars have judged the Trump presidency to be an ineffective failure by applying theories of presidential power derived from the research of Richard Neustadt, who emphasized the need for presidents to master the task of bargaining with other stakeholders in the American political system to overcome what he saw as the limited potency of unilateral action. Such an approach, however, fails to account for two important considerations: (1) whether Trump’s goals in office were similar to those of other presidents, and (2) whether the Trump presidency was instead organized around the principles of unitary executive theory, an increasingly popular conception of the presidency in conservative intellectual circles. Viewing the Trump presidency through this alternative lens emphasizes its successes in gaining political control over elements of the executive branch bureaucracy and resisting institutional checks by Congress, raising serious questions about whether Trump was indeed often effective in realizing his goals—and whether future presidents will follow in the same path.

Democracy and Prevention of Corruption in the European Legislation

Abstract This article discuses the concept of democracy, corruption and the relationship between. Democracy and corruption have been perceived to be in a close and complex relationship with each other. Scholars have argued that a solid link exist between them. When democracy weakens, we can almost certainly expect an increase in corruption due to the attrition of institutional checks and balances, independence of courts and frequent restriction of the space for civil society actions and political rights of citizens. The paper analyses the large impact corruption has on democracy, and the states sustained efforts to limit corruption can improve the strength of democracy by promoting just and competitive elections, ensuring better quality and delivery of public services and improving citizens’ trust in political institutions and governments. The paper in the second part observes the legal norms approved by the European legislation concerning the fight against corruption, it seems possible to outline an emerging model of corruption prevention by concluding that the effort of European and national legislation to limit corruption should be a contribution to the consolidation of democratic regimes and efforts to improve the quality of governance.

Technocratic Populism in Hybrid Regimes: Georgia on My Mind and in My Pocket

Most studies of technocratic populism have focused on democracies under stress (e.g., Italy, Czech Republic). This article builds on and extends these studies by analyzing a hybrid regime—post-Soviet Georgia—and argues that technocratic populism in this context is utilized as a façade to cover authoritarian and oligarchic tendencies, while suspending (or reversing) democratization efforts. The state apparatus is weaponized against current and potential political opponents. Ideology is irrelevant, loyalty is key, and passivity is encouraged. The government aims to chip away at institutional checks and balances, and to demobilize the public by undermining confidence in the country’s representative institutions while increasing dependence on experienced personalities, the ‘can do experts.’ The result is most often a stable partial-reform equilibrium. We illustrate this argument with evidence from Georgia, where Bidzina Ivanishvili, the richest man in the country, came to power in 2012 and, despite not holding any official position in the government since 2013, has run the state as a firm.

Does partisanship promote anti-democratic impulses? Evidence from a survey experiment

ABSTRACT Emerging research argues that liberal democracy, including American democracy, is showing evidence of erosion and is in retreat around the world. Our research provides a counterbalance to concerns for American democratic decline by exploring the willingness of Americans to grant the president more authority for partisan reasons. We draw from a survey experiment administered to 1000 Americans embedded within the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Elections Survey (CCES). This experiment evaluates the influence of co-partisanship on support for undemocratic actions to empower presidents. We find that on average, respondents oppose a series of intensifying actions, across all partisan groupings and treatment conditions. We also find that co-partisanship with the president affects Democratic responses, but not those of Republicans. Democrats are less opposed to empowering President Obama relative to President Trump. But, overall, Republicans are less opposed to undemocratic acts than Democrats across all conditions. We interpret these results as relatively good news for American democracy. Partisan polarization may drive relative differences in support for expanding presidential power, but overall support for democracy, separation of powers, and institutional checks and balances remain high.

Law against the Rule of Law: Assaulting Democracy

AbstractThis article examines how authoritarian contenders use law to advance an agenda geared to exclusive state power in light of a paradigmatic case: the National Socialists’ takeover of the German state apparatus in spring 1933. This case highlights two ways in which an office holder is able to expand his power in an authoritarian fashion through legal dispositions. A conjunctural use of law for authoritarian purposes draws on legal statutes to undercut the political capacity of opponents and competitors, hollow out institutional checks, and crucially hamper civil freedoms. Taking advantage of constitutional provisions that make institutional subversion from within possible (‘constitutional Trojan horses’), a structural use of legal statutes reorders the power structure by reallocating decisional rights. In both cases, law serves as a weapon against the rule of law. These considerations raise the question of the standards by which we are to judge the legality of such acts. Contemporary instances of democratic backsliding are cases in point.

Identity Politics or Economics? Explaining Voter Support for Hungary’s Illiberal FIDESZ

This article tests cultural and economic explanations of why the longest surviving illiberal government in Central Europe, Hungary’s FIDESZ, has maintained popular support throughout two elections despite dismantling institutional checks and balances. Much of the literature on illiberalism in Central Europe attributes the appeal and successes of these governments to the brand of identity politics and rhetorical vilification of “others” practiced by their leaders. Yet the role of economic growth, a strong determinant of voter behaviour, has received little theoretical attention in accounting for illiberal party support. Using five rounds of European Social Survey data from 2010 to 2018, I show that economic satisfaction rather than a host of cultural factors, notably anti-migrant and anti-European Union attitudes, better predicts support for FIDESZ and satisfaction with government. I examine the implications of these results for understanding and conceptualising voter behaviour under backsliding. Voters may not understand what backsliding is and therefore are unable to penalise it or they may take information about backsliding into account and judge backsliding to be the price of prosperity. These findings and the discussion of voter behaviour raise important questions about the role of economic growth in sustaining illiberalism in Central Europe and other third wave democracies.

Democratic regression in comparative perspective: scope, methods, and causes

ABSTRACT Between 1974 and 2005, a majority of states became democratic for the first time in history. However, a global democratic recession began in 2006 and has persisted – and deepened – over the past 14 years. Not only have average levels of freedom (or democratic quality) been declining globally and in most parts of the world, but the pace of democratic breakdown accelerated and the number of democratic transitions declined, particularly in the past five years. Democratic regression is particularly visible among the G-20 countries and other most populous and geopolitically weighty countries, 19 of which have declined in freedom during the democratic recession, with only two improving. The principal method of democratic regression has been incremental strangulation of democracy by elected (typically populist) executives who gradually eviscerate institutional checks, political opposition, independent media, and other forces of scrutiny and resistance in civil society. Weak and declining rule of law has predisposed regimes to democratic regression, enabling ambitious rulers to hollow out political competition. But international factors have also been crucial, generating common economic and social stresses while lifting the constraints and lowering the risks autocrats face as they inaugurate or accelerate the slide into authoritarianism.

Binding the Unbound Executive: Checks and Balances in Times of Pandemic

Emergency governance, we are often told, is executive governance. Only the executive branch has the information, decisiveness, and speed to respond to crises, and so the executive is not capable of being effectively constrained by other branches. Ordinary checks and balances, then, are believed to effectively disappear during a crisis. Referring to the classic theorist of emergency rule, conventional accounts describe crisis governance as “Schmittian” and “post-Madisonian,” characterized by an unbound executive that faces few, if any, legal constraints. This Article interrogates these propositions using evidence from how countries around the world have responded to the 2020 global pandemic. It presents data from an original and global survey of over one hundred countries to evaluate the nature of emergency powers during the pandemic. The survey captures, for each country, the legal basis for the country’s pandemic response as well as the extent to which there has been judicial or legislative oversight, and whether the central pandemic response has encountered pushback from subnational units. This Article finds that, contrary to this conventional wisdom, courts, legislatures and subnational governments have played important roles in constraining national executives. Courts have played three different roles: (1) they have insisted on procedural integrity of invocations of emergency; (2) they have engaged in substantive review of rights restrictions, balancing rights against public health concerns; and (3) they have in some cases demanded that government take affirmative steps to combat the COVID-19 virus and its effects. Legislatures have likewise played an active role in providing oversight and, in many cases, in producing new legislation that responds to the current crisis. Subnational governments, too, have pushed back against central authorities, engaging in valuable checks and balances that shaped the appropriate response. Taken together, these findings suggest that, in the current crisis, emergency governance has been closer to the Madisonian ideal of strong checks and balances than to Schmittian accounts of an unbound executive. This Article considers the implications of these findings for theories of emergency governance, arguing that the conventional theories are based on one particular type of crisis—a national security crisis—and therefore their insights are ill-suited to other kinds of emergencies, such as a pandemic. It develops a typology of crises and conceptualizes how different kinds of emergencies require different modes of crisis governance. Specifically, in crises like a pandemic—in which information is dispersed, the crisis is slow-moving, and local governments are needed to implement the crisis response—the executive is structurally more bound than in national security crises. This Article further defends the role of institutional checks and balances during emergencies, arguing that they are likely to produce more legitimate and reasoned responses than the executive acting alone. This is especially important in situations in which it is not clear what the optimal response is, and for which different societies may have legitimate differences over how to balance protective measures against civil liberties. For many crises, then, emergency governance should be Madisonian, not Schmittian.

Time for a haircut: political regimes and sovereign debt restructurings

ABSTRACT Conventional wisdom claims that reputation leads sovereign states to full debt repayment. However, defaults are recurrent, some debtor countries take a lot of time to end them, and some extract costly concessions from investors. This article argues that these differences are largely explained by the political regimes in the borrowing countries. While previous research examines whether democracies make more credible commitments, we analyze how democracies affect bargaining with foreign investors after a default occurs. Democracies, with their institutional checks, electoral uncertainty, greater transparency, and public deliberation, make swift decision-making harder, create incentives to pander and posture, and give leverage to minimize the win set of viable agreements. We test our theory on a comprehensive dataset of debt restructurings with private creditors in the period 1975–2017. The event history analysis indicates that democracies experience longer restructurings and the double-hurdle regression analysis shows that democracies obtain larger creditor losses. Further, there is interesting variation among democracies and autocracies. Our findings suggest that political regimes are crucial to explaining why cooperation fails in international debt markets.

Use of smartphones amongst undergraduates in Nigeria: aid or distraction to their studies

Smartphone usage has revolutionised interpersonal communication in the world with the launch of the first smartphone device called 'The Simon', established by IBM in 1994. With the introduction of smartphone mobile applications (apps) such as dictionaries, calculators, Word Document, etc., undergraduates see their smartphones as an important companion in their studies. However, there are negative impacts of smartphones on undergraduates. Based on the Media Richness theory, this research investigates the role of smartphones in undergraduate studies using quantitative research design method, and with questionnaires administered to 380 students of two Nigerian higher institutions. The research concludes that smartphone can significantly be an aid but can also be a distraction to undergraduate studies if no institutional checks are put in place. This paper recommends that undergraduates should be encouraged to use helpful academic apps during their studies but higher institutions should put checks in place to prevent abuse of smartphone usage.

The Origins of Indonesian Populism: Public Debate in Java, March–June 1945

The Origins of Indonesian Populism: Public Debate in Java, March–June 1945 Gerry van Klinken (bio) In the mid-1990s I met an old man in Surakarta, a lawyer named Soewidji. He gave me a booklet he had written in the last months of the Japanese regime. He told me the police (!) had asked him to submit to Jakarta his thoughts on Indonesia’s future as a nation. In it he offered a revision of the state ideology Panca Dharma that, he claimed, looked much like Sukarno’s later Pancasila. He sent in his submission, keeping a copy that he later self-published.1 Pursuing this lead I discovered the traces of a major state-sponsored initiative between March and June of 1945 to get Indonesians talking about the kind of independence they wanted. Provincial town-hall meetings were held all over Java. More submissions were sent to Jakarta. Many were published in the Indonesian-language press. One participant later collected 111 clippings in a small book.2 The real number is higher—I found a few more myself. Clearly the discussions were meant to feed in to the [End Page 43] elite meetings held in Jakarta commencing late May 1945 that eventually produced the constitution under which Indonesia still operates. Two things surprised me when I first dived into this discussion. One was that it had been so broadly based. It extended far beyond a small hand-picked circle. Another was that so few of the submissions seemed to favor a thoroughly democratic future. A few urged that Indonesia should become a democracy, with institutional checks and balances and a pluralist political party system. But the great majority showed no interest in institutions. Some wrote of shedding blood for the fatherland; others of a Super Leader, of the state as a great family, and of village solidarity. We would today call their tone populist. Many of their themes continued to resonate throughout the revolution that was shortly to follow, and into independence. Both the endurance of these themes, and the suggestion that they appeared to enjoy considerable legitimacy right from the beginning, raised questions in my mind about the roots of Indonesian democracy. The question has bothered others who have written about popular mobilization in this formative period. Ben Anderson found the moment between November 1944 and July 1946 emancipatory, “as if for one brief moment the societies of Southeast Asia could begin to shape their own futures without dictation from outside.”3 David Bourchier, on the contrary, highlighted the failure to include the term “rights” in the constitution that emerged out of this period. The idea of rights had been pushed out in the preceding debate among elite Indonesian delegates by the combined ideological forces of conservative organicism (associated with law professor Supomo) and egalitarian collectivism (Sukarno).4 The present paper examines this remarkable public debate of early 1945 through the lens of recent thinking about populism. The late wartime discussion, long overshadowed by the revolution that followed it, turns out to have heightened relevance to our attempts to understand Indonesian democracy today. The paper introduces two new claims to the scholarly debate about this period. The first is that this was a populist moment, not a liberal, cosmopolitan one. The choice before the political public in Java in the first half of 1945 was not between liberal democracy and some form of authoritarianism. It was between different forms of populism. The second claim is that progress on assessing the democratic potential of those forms of populism is possible. The key step is to replace the usual ideological definition of populism with a strategic one. Populism is here seen as a technique for mobilizing people in order to build a new power base. The same technique, and often the same ideological content, can be deployed either for mobilization from the top down, or from the bottom up. It is these rival mobilizational programs that produced different kinds of populism. [End Page 44] What is populism? In 2017, the Cambridge Dictionary made “populism” its word of the year.5 Today the term is associated with the rise of the far right. It is seen as a harbinger of fascism...

Populist Party Leaders in Belgium: an Analysis of VB AND PVDA-PTB

Abstract This article scrutinizes the position and the role of the party leader in two populist parties in Belgium: Vlaams Belang (VB) and Partij van de Arbeid — Parti du Travail de Belgique (PVDA-PTB). Following Mudde’s definition, populism is understood as a people-centered and anti-elitist ideology. The article argues that, if one accepts the notion that parties will organize themselves in line with their ideological beliefs, then one should expect populist parties to exhibit three main characteristics: leaders are directly elected by the party members, they have extensive powers with only minimal intra-party institutional checks, and they feature strongly in electoral campaigns. Applying this argument to the two Belgian populist parties, the article finds only limited evidence for the argument that populist parties mirror their ideology in the role and position of their party leader.

Tocqueville’s Critique of the U.S. Constitution

ABSTRACTFew studies of Democracy in America give substantial weight to Tocqueville’s analysis of the United States Constitution in volume 1, part 1, chapter 8. In this article, I argue that Tocqueville’s analysis deserves closer study. Tocqueville provides a nuanced critique of the institutional design of the federal government lauded in The Federalist, expressing grave concerns about the legislative and executive branches, in particular. While Tocqueville praises the judicial branch, he is more concerned than Publius is about the potential vulnerabilities of this branch. Moreover, these faults that Tocqueville finds with the Constitution’s institutional design are rooted in his belief that it is the social state and not the system of checks and balances that should be credited for the success of American democracy. He predicts that if there is a significant change in the social state, then institutional checks and balances will not fill in the gaps as the Framers of the Constitution intended. These insights about the limits of institutional design provide important lessons for contemporary scholars, especially in a moment when political scientists are sounding alarm bells about the waning attachment to fundamental democratic values in democracies around the globe.

The rule of law, arbitrariness and institutional virtue

This article summarises Professor Martin Krygier's work on the rule of law and his view that arbitrariness is its core and is under-theorised. From ancient philosophy, the author suggests that our rule of law settlement feels tentative because arbitrariness is a human characteristic that cannot be completely fixed with institutional checks and balances. The author observes that a variety of rule of law virtues are already expected of judicial decision-makers and suggests that these institutional virtues should be transferred into the administrative, executive and corporate decision-making space to advance the rule of law project.

Truth in Education and Science

The growing number of universities today makes it relevant to consider again the idea of the university. Consulting the classics of the discussion, I argue that we must retain the idealist notions of knowledge, science and truth professed by Newman in his argument for liberal education, although he neglects the possible corruption of the university faculty. The problem of corruption is recognized by Jaspers, criticizing all idealist notions and leaving science and scholarship to rely only on existential commitment. The problem for both classics, however, is that they conceive of academic freedom in an all-too individualist way. Instead, I argue that the idea of the academic republic should be taken seriously, i.e., that a contemporary idea of the university must include suggestions for university government comprising institutional checks and balances. Only such a constitutional notion of academic freedom may counter neo-liberal reification of higher education, science, and scholarship.

Autocratic checks and balances? Trust in courts and bureaucratic discretion

ABSTRACTAn emerging literature in political economy focuses on democratic enclaves or pockets of quasi-democratic decision-making embedded in non-democracies. This article first explores the factors that may lead to the emergence of such institutional checks and balances in autocratic politics. I use the comparative analysis of courts in Morocco and Tunisia, and argue that interest group mobilization and the centrality of legalism in political development have been essential for the existence of “governance” enclaves. Second, I explore whether such checks effectively contain everyday rent-seeking, as well as the theoretical channels through which this may occur. Findings from firm-level surveys conducted in Morocco and Tunisia in 2013 indicate that higher general trust in courts, even in modest relative terms, rendered businesses significantly less vulnerable to tax corruption in Tunisia, in sharp contrast to the Moroccan case.

Authoritarian Gridlock? Understanding Delay in the Chinese Legislative System

Legislative gridlock is often viewed as a uniquely democratic phenomenon. The institutional checks and balances that produce gridlock are absent from authoritarian systems, leading many observers to romanticize “authoritarian efficiency” and policy dynamism. A unique data set from the Chinese case demonstrates that authoritarian regimes can have trouble passing laws and changing policies—48% of laws are not passed within the period specified in legislative plans, and about 12% of laws take more than 10 years to pass. This article develops a theory that relates variation in legislative outcomes to the absence of division within the ruling coalition and citizen attention shocks. Qualitative analysis of China’s Food Safety Law, coupled with shadow case studies of two other laws, illustrates the plausibility of the theoretical mechanisms. Division and public opinion play decisive roles in authoritarian legislative processes.

How Democracy Dies (in Poland): A Case Study of Anti-Constitutional Populist Backsliding

A dramatic change occurred in Polish constitutional politics in 2015: a combined presidential and parliamentary victory of the populist Law and Justice party [PiS] began a series of deep political and legal changes which turned the constitutional order on its head in many respects. In this paper, I provide a detailed account (in Part 3) of how comprehensive and momentous the legal changes are, in particular going so far as to dismantle institutional checks on the government (including paralysis the Constitutional Tribunal, and then conversion of it into an active supporter of the government) and to erode a number of individual and political rights, such as the right to assembly and privacy. This account is preceded by first outlining the general characteristics of Polish transformation since 2015 (in Part 1), and then explaining why the concept of “anti-constitutional populist backsliding” is the most appropriate way of characterising it (Part 2): it is “anti-constitutional” because it proceeds through statutory “amendments” and outright breaches of the Constitution; it is “populist” because the ruling elite is actively concerned to foment societal support and mobilisation, and it is “backsliding” because it should be seen against the baseline of high democratic standards already achieved in the recent past. After providing this account, I offer tentative explanations of the sources of PiS electoral success and then of its strong popularity in the society (Part 4), and in the Conclusions, I take a step back from the detailed account to offer more general observations about what the Polish case can teach us about the vexed question hotly debated in political sciences and constitutional theory these days, namely whether a “populist democracy” or “illiberal democracy” is still a democracy tout court.

Authoritarian Gridlock? Understanding Delay in the Chinese Legislative System

Legislative gridlock is often viewed as a uniquely democratic phenomenon. The institutional checks and balances that produce gridlock are absent from systems, leading many observers to romanticize authoritarian efficiency and policy dynamism. A unique dataset from the Chinese case demonstrates that regimes can have trouble passing laws and changing policies - 48% of laws are not passed within the period specified in legislative plans, and about 12% of laws take over ten years to pass. This paper develops a theory that relates variation in legislative outcomes to the absence of division within the ruling coalition and citizen attention shocks. Qualitative analysis of China's Food Safety Law (2009), coupled with shadow case studies of two other laws, illustrate the plausibility of the theoretical mechanisms. Division and public opinion play decisive roles in legislative processes.

Obama's Foreign Policy Legacy and the Myth of Retrenchment

The election of Donald J. Trump jolted the Washington, D.C. foreign policy community. Though erratic and habitually self-contradictory, Trump seemed to be the first man elected president since World War II to explicitly question America’s role in the world. Although Republicans and Democrats spend a lot of time criticizing each other, foreign policy leaders have generally agreed on the broad strokes of American strategy over the past 70 years. Both parties have supported the steady expansion of free trade, the promotion of regional stability through American military and diplomatic activism, and the maintenance of the “liberal world order” established in the wake of World War II. The consensus around this grand strategy, known loosely as primacy or liberal hegemony, accelerated after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, at which point political leaders used fears of terrorism to justify an even more interventionist and militaristic approach to foreign policy. The extent to which Trump will actually depart from this expansive global role of foreign policy activism remains to be seen. Early signs suggest that the bureaucracy, institutional checks, and bipartisan consensus on this grand strategy are moderating Trump’s fitful dissension, resulting in something that looks very close to traditional U.S. foreign policy. As a result, Trump’s bark may prove to be much worse than his bite.