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First draft
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Theoretical, conceptual and methodological problems in
applying Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy to
autonomous regions in Europe
Prof. Dr. Lieven De Winter Université Catholique de Louvain
Katholieke Universiteit Brussel
[email protected] Discussion Paper for the workshop Workshop # 30 “Patterns of regional democracies: Institution building and policy performance in European autonomous regions” directed by Adrian Vatter and Lieven De Winter during the Joint Sessions of the European Consortium for Political Research, Granada, April 14-19, 2005
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Theoretical, conceptual and methodological problems in applying Arend
Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy to autonomous regions in Europe
Prof. Dr. Lieven De Winter
Université Catholique de Louvain and
Katholieke Universiteit Brussel
I. Introduction
The basic idea of this workshop and research approach is that the dichotomy
majoritarian vs. consensus democracy developed in Arend Lijphart’s seminal Patterns of
Democracy (1999) is a useful conceptual and methodological tool to understand the
nature of democracy in autonomous regions.
In this discussion paper a number of theoretical, conceptual and methodological
problems in applying Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy to regional political systems will
be addressed.
A first question is whether autonomous regions can be considered as fully-
fledged democratic political systems similar to the state democracies Lijphart considers.
A second question is whether the indicators he used for studying countries are
valid and reliable.
A third question is whether the indicators he used for studying countries are valid
for regional democracies. If not, are there functional equivalent indicators that can be
developed for regions? Also, are the indicators used by Lijphart exhaustive to measure
majoritarian/consensus democracy?
Fourth, we will discuss the way Lijphart aggregates his data collected for the ten
dimensions.
Finally, are there theoretically and methodologically more relevant theories for
classifying institutional types of (regional) democracies? Do such theories have more
(potentially) explanatory power for explaining the variation of the political outputs of
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regions? Are they more easily operationalisable than Ljjphart’s ten theoretical
dimensions?
II. Autonomous regions as fully-fledged democratic political systems
In order to draw any valid causal conclusions regarding the association between
institutional arrangements and performance, the selection of cases is a crucial phase in
any research design (King, Keohane & Verba, 1994).
Lijphart bases his selection of cases for Patterns of Democracy on three criteria:
- a democracy (in practice receiving the score “free” from Freedom House
rankings
- a stable regime (in practice having enjoyed uninterrupted democratic rule
for the previous 19 years)
- excluding micro-states (in practice, those with less than 250.000
inhabitants).
Implicitly, Lijphart adds a fourth dimension, i.e. being a democracy at the state
level. But clearly he sees his polar typology between consensus and majoritarian
democracy as applicable to political systems at other than the state level. In fact, he
presents the EU (together with Switzerland and Belgium) as one of the three real world
examples that come in practice closest to the consensus ideal type. Still most
Europeanists (Hix, 1999:2-5) argue that the EU is not a state, not even a confederation? It
is a political system that resembles the classical state in many ways but also diverts from
it in essential features (like the monopoly of the legitimate use of coercion). So by
presenting the EU as a very good example of a consensus democracy Lijphart himself
skips levels without legitimating this level jump. In fact, theoretically, the typology of
consensus and majoritarian democracies can be applied to any democratic political
system, even if institutionally it is less fully equipped than the state. Institutional power
sharing or concentration of power can vary also in local or provincial political systems.
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One could even apply the notions of power sharing1 or concentration of power to non-
political complex authority systems, like the Catholic Church, a multinational enterprise,
or a university.
Thus, we should not be concerned too much by the level-hopping in this project.
But in order to guarantee comparability without stretching too much the original concepts
of the components of consensus and majoritarian democracies, we have to restrict our
selection of cases to regions that have achieved a sufficient level of institutional
development (in terms of number of relevant consensus/majoritarian dimensions present)
and a sufficient institutional division of labour between these regional institutions. These
diverse institutions and the actors that work within them should also have a sufficient
degree of autonomy from state-wide actors in order to constitute a proper “system” of
interactions of its components. If all interactions between regional actors and institutions
were to be steered by state actors and institutions (such as state wide parties) that just
send their decisions top-downwards for ratification and implementation, it makes no
sense to look for specific patterns of democracy at the regional level, as these would be
entirely dependent and similar to those found at the state level. Thus we have to define
the components of regional institutional development and their degree of autonomy from
state institutions and actors, in order to be able to distinguish roughly between
autonomous regional political systems and state-determined regional political systems.2
The literature on comparative federalism and regional autonomy is not
unequivocal on how to classify regions in Europe (Labasse, 1991; Croisat, 1999; Lane &
Ersson, 1999, Lijphart, 1999). Even the spokespersons of “regions with legislative
power” are not always clear about who belongs to their “club”.
The ideal-type of an institutionally fully developed and autonomous regional
political system would include the following features:
1 We use the notion of power sharing in a general sense, while Lijphart also uses it as synonymous to consociational democracy (2000:426), the latter constituting “an obstacle in communicating with policy-makers who found it to be too esoteric and polysyllabic” (2000:427). 2 This still leaves us with 74 regions in Western Europe. For exploratory research for operationalising institutional arrangements and grasping their potential policy outputs, one could start with a mixed design, in which we will include all EU-regions that have sufficient autonomy to be considered as a “autonomous” political system (see below), and within the countries in which some regions have strong autonomy and others only weak (UK, Spain, Italy, France), to match the study of these strong regions with an equal number of weak regions in that country.
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1) the region’s existence is guaranteed by constitutional or other basic law;
2) the region has it’s own constitution that specifies its competencies in
which the state level cannot interfere;
3) revisions of the state constitution (regarding the division of
competencies between state and region) can only be made by co-
decision between state and regions (under consensus or special majority
rule);
4) proper or shared policy competencies are guaranteed by constitutional
or other basic law;
5) the region has a directly elected regional assembly granted classical
parliamentary functions (legislation, executive oversight, government
making, etc.)
6) the region is autonomous in the design of regional or subregional (local)
institutions (autonomie constitutive);3
7) the region has the right to appeal to a constitutional or other higher
(federal) court to solve conflicts with the state level;
8) the region has a constitutional or other specialised court to
autonomously solve conflicts between actors within the regional
political system;
9) the region participates in the decision making at the national level
through a guaranteed representation in a second chamber, or through
other explicit provisions or intergovernmental agreements for policy
coordination;4
10) the region participates in EU decision making (including treaty
approval) when matters of (exclusive) regional competence are treated
by the European Council of Ministers, through a variety of ways;5
11) the region enjoys large taxing & spending autonomy.
3 For instance in the field of regional/local administrative and electoral system. 4 For instance through the participation of a regional minister in the Italian Council of Ministers meetings whenever regional matters are discussed. 5 Presence of regional ministers in state delegations to the European council of ministers, required approval of European treaties by regional institutions (executive, legislature).
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Currently, no European region enjoys fully the entire set of these institutional
development and autonomy features.6 Hence, there is the question of fixing a threshold
that allows us to dichotomise real world cases between “rather autonomous” and “rather
state-determined” regional political systems, and that can serve as a yardstick for
selecting our cases.
How do we define essential and necessary features of regions for inclusion in our
research universe of autonomous regional political systems? First, I would argue that we
do not consider as essential the role of regions in EU decision making, as this would limit
the applicability of our theoretical and empirical approach to EU regions while they could
be equally valid for the Swiss cantons, Canadian provinces or American states. However,
in the short run, I do suggest for practical reasons that we limit our cases to regions of the
EU before the 2004 enlargement (plus Switzerland). While the EU has become an
important higher authority for many regions, affecting their institutional arrangements
and performance, it is too early to include regions in the enlargement countries as they
only recently became eligible for EU cohesion policies. Also mostly the regional level in
these countries is institutionally too underdeveloped and/or too instable to be recognized
as a significant political level of these (often recent) democracies (Keating & Hughes,
2003).
The criteria used by the EU (NUTS) are not useful, as they are based on
population size, administrative units, functional policy relevance, and statistical coverage.
Hooghe and Marks (1996:191-192) define (political) regions as the most authoritative tier
of intermediate (i.e. between the “national” and the “local”) government at a given point
of time.7 The Committee of the Regions (CoR) accepts regions as well as other sub-state
units, such as provinces and cities. The voluntary associations of regions (RegLeg: the
Conference of European regions with Legislative power; CALRE : the Conference of
European Regional Legislative Assemblies, ARE: the Assembly of the Regions of
6 But probably the German regions come closest to this ideal-type (cfr. their position of the regional governance scale of Hooghe and Marks, 2001:193-194). 7 In practice, this corresponds to NUTS1 and NUTS2 regions in the EU’s categorization.
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Europe) put the emphasis on a (directly elected) regional assembly with legislative
powers.8
If we use the rather inclusive selection criteria used by RegLeg and CALRE, our
potential research population includes all German and Austrian Länder, all Belgian
regions and communities, Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland, the three historic
autonomous communities in Spain as well as the other autonomous regions, all Italian
regions, Aland, the Azores and Madeira, to which we could add the Swiss cantons.
In addition, there is the question of size. Lijphart excludes countries under
250.000 (an arbitrary threshold) inhabitants, simply arguing that in comparative analysis
the cutoff point is usually one million or 250.000 inhabitants (Lijphart, 1999:52) and he
generally tends to opt for the most inclusive criterion. In fact, here are many good reasons
for excluding mini- and microstates, to the extent they tend to not have a fully equipped
institutional system and to depend on larger countries to deliver basic policies like social
security, defense, foreign affairs, currency, etc. However, the argument of institutional
underdevelopment is a matter that should be studied case by case, and can not be decided
solely on the basis of the population size. One could argue that some cases included in
Lijphart’s 36 democracies do not have a fully equipped institutional system either.9 Still,
even when we should not use the criteria of size as a selection criterion in addition to the
ones mentioned above, size certainly should appear as a control variable for seizing the
impact of institutions on performance.
Finally, there is the question of the required stability of the regional political
system. We could use Lijphart criterion of 19 or 20 years, arguing that in order for a
majoritarian or consensus model to be established and become functional, it may take
8 ARE requires political representation exercised by an elected regional assembly. RegLeg does not only requires the regional parliament to exercise legislative powers, but generally demands that the region should have the quasi-similar responsibilities that EU member states enjoy in their domains of competency in the three spheres of power: legislative, executive and judiciary (in practice it is composed of 74 regions from Belgium, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Finland and the UK, but not France). CALRE only mentiones legislative powers and includes exactly the same countries as RegLeg. 9 For instance, Luxemburg used the Belgian franc as it currency, and its monetary policy were therefore dependant on the decisions of the Belgian National Bank. When Luxembourg heads the European Council, it largely appeals to the support of Belgian diplomats to run the Luxembourg presidency.
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several years or legislative terms for a regional system to become consolidated. In
addition, for regions that only recently obtained a directly elected assembly with
legislative powers, if may be difficult to find proper and rather stable policy output data.
However, applying Lijphart’s regime stability criterion would force us to exclude the
Belgian and British regions from our research universe. We suggest to opt for a much
more inclusive criterion, i.e. that we consider autonomous regions that currently have
concluded at least a first legislative term (and thus a second direct election of the
assembly). This criterion may allow them a minimal time required to make the necessary
institutional arrangements, to act together and learn from lessons and mistakes made
during the first term. We also suggest that in a first phase of this research, data will be
analysed synchronically, on the basis of the situation in the last decade (1994-2004).10
III. Validity of Lijphart’s indicators
A general critique that covers many of Lijphart’s indicators of consensual or
majoritarian institutional arrangements is that these indicators do not measure
institutional arrangements, but their theoretically predicted most likely consequences
(Taagepera, 2003). They do not operationalise sets of rules, but only their theoretically
expected outcomes. In some cases this approximation of institutions by “likely outcomes”
is acceptable, if the outcome represents a good summary measure of a variety of rules.
For instance, using disproportionality to measure the degree of majoritarianism of the
electoral system seems a valid proxy for the most common rules of an electoral system
(constituency size, threshold, electoral formula, size of the parliament, higher level seat
allocation), even when in theory one cannot legislate rules that guarantee a strictly
proportional outcome (Taagepera, 2003). One could develop a specific measure for each
of these electoral rules, such as average number of seats attributed to each constituency,
level of threshold, etc. But the main question of the majoritarian/consensus character of
the electoral system is to what extent seats are in practice proportionally allocated (or
10 Depending on the additional resources that can be mounted in the future, we will include data starting from the beginning of devolution process on.
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even disproportionately in favour of minorities) or whether the electorally stronger
parties receive a bonus in terms of seats. Hence the outcome measure is a good proxy of
the effects of a variety of electoral rules that affect the proportionality of an electoral
system. However, it may still have been preferable to use institutional measures of the
electoral system (like Lijphart’s 1994 effective threshold or Taagepera and Shugart’s
1989 effective magnitude), taking into account the fact that the electoral system
constitutes the central causal variable affecting party system fragmentation, executive
power concentration and executive/legislative relations. These are dimensions for which
Lijphart only uses outcome indicators and that are hardly susceptible to institutional
design (infra).
But for many other institutional dimensions, using outcome measures is
theoretically less valid, because the outcomes are affected much more (than the case
mentioned above11) by the intervention and interaction of other institutional and
behavioral features. For instance, in most countries, effective rules regarding the
fragmentation of the party system, such as the German party recognition rules (Müller,
2002: 262-264) do not exist. In no country does party legislation stipulate a two-party or
a multiparty system. In most western democracies they are no or few rules that prohibit
the founding of new parties or their participation in elections (apart of course from the
electoral rules mentioned above and some rules about financing electoral campaigns that
may favor larger parties) (Farrell, 2002:71). Hence the fragmentation of the party system
is not an institutional dimension: it is mainly determined by the cleavage structure (a non-
institutional “cultural” factor) and the electoral system.
Also, regarding the concentration of executive power, only in a few countries the
formation of minority governments is prohibited or institutionally rendered very unlikely.
The presence of investiture rules may facilitate the formation of majority governments
(Strom, 1990; Bergman; 1995), but do not exclude minority governments. Also,
oversized majorities are rarely the consequence of formation rules, although there are
some formation rules that do facilitate the occurrence of oversized coalitions (double
11 Even in the case of proportionality as outcome variable as proxy for electoral system rules, the link between rules and outcomes is not mechanic. PR rules tend to enhance proportionality, but the actual degree of proportionality is also dependent on the number of parties competiting, especially if the number of seats per constituency is low.
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majority in bicameral systems, parliamentary supermajorities for constitutional revisions,
etc.). So using outcomes to measure institutions regarding the composition of the
government obfuscates the causes of the predominance of particular government
compositions, which could be in fact due to institutional rules, but also to non-
institutional factors, like a consensual political culture or parties’ strategies for blame-
sharing.
Lijphart regularly uses indicators whose validity and reliability may be highly
questionable. First, his allocation of certain party composition to the
majoritarian/consensus pole is flawed vis-à-vis the majoritarian/consensual distinction.
His category of “one-party cabinets” includes both single party minority cabinets and
single party majority cabinets (Lijphart, 1999:109-111). However, these are very
different types of cabinets in terms of the consensus/majoritarian logic. A minority
government must share power with parliament, as the opposition controls a majority of
seats and can unseat at any moment the government. In order to pass legislation, a
majority of MPs must vote in favour of the government’s legislative proposals. A single
party majority cabinet can largely neglect parliament, as long as the parliamentary party
is disciplined and MPs support their leaders in cabinet unconditionally. Thus, putting
together in one variable cabinets that work following a consensual pattern with those that
run on a majoritarian logic, is devoid of meaning. The same problem occurs with the
category minimal winning cabinets, that combines single party majority cabinets with
minimal winning coalition cabinets (Lijphart, 1999:109-111). A more appropriate
operationalisation would measure, weigh and aggregate the occurrence of potentially five
(or less if combining some categories) types of cabinets, ordered along a
majoritarian/consensus scale: single party majority, minimal winning coalition cabinets,
oversized majority coalitions, minority single party cabinets and finally minority
coalitions.
In addition, the power-sharing between the executive and the legislative power is
theoretically not logically related to Lijphart’s empirical indicator, i.e. the stability of the
executive. An executive can be very stable but a loyal delegate of the parliamentary
majority group(s), and short lived governments do in fact probably indicate weak
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governments, but not necessarily strong parliaments.12 Their instability may be due to
many other factors.13 There are many institutional rules that contribute to the power
relations between executives and legislatures, like the control over the parliamentary
agenda, the powers of the committees, the right to initiate money bills, the capacity of
Parliament to dismiss the government, etc. All these are genuine institutional
“parliamentary rights” that can be operationalised, weighted and aggregated (Döring,
1992, 1995; Strom 1990) and tend to work well as indicators for executive/legislative
dominance and as determinants to theoretically predicted causal policy consequences.14
Sometimes Lijphart is not cautions in the use of indicators developed by other
experts, for instance, using Siaroff’s (1999) eight indicators of neo-corporatism. Some of
these do refer to institutional rules, such as the official (monopolistic) recognition of
(peak) organizations as social partners allowed at the tables of trilateral negotiations and
integrated into policy-making (Siaroff, 1999:195-196), while others are clearly outcomes
of such rules, like the number of days lost by strikes. This outcome variable is then also
used in Lijphart’s (1999:266-269) analysis of the consequences of institutional patterns
on system outputs, and thus, to some extent cause and consequence are based on identical
data (thus creating a problem of endogeneity).
The frequent use of averages when several indicators are available is also
problematic, like in the case of measuring the fragmentation of the party composition of
cabinets. It would have been preferable to argue in favour of one or the other based on
their intrinsic value and relevance to the majoritarian/consensus dimension. Also, the
solution for dealing with the real problem of factionalised parties and closed allied parties
12 His argument is not at all convincing, not because short-lived cabinets are not weak, but because long-lived are not necessarily powerful (for instance, there are many stable minority governments who were weak, had to bargain every policy with parliament in which the opposition controlled a majority). Also long-lived cabinets can be weak vis-à-vis parliament. It is not because the cabinet has a short life that the ministers are unstable (in Italy, the government falls once a year but ministers remain in place and there is continuity in terms of policies). Moreover, parties in government can remain the same and can continue their policies even if the Prime Minister changes. The duration of a cabinet does not mean at the same time that Parliament is weak or strong. For example, in the US a strong government and a strong Congress cohabitate (these are unconnected elements). 13 Müller and Strom (2000: 586) conclude that amongst causes of government termination in 13 European countries in the postwar period, only 11.2% were due to a cabinet’s defeat in parliament. 14 Lijphart (2002:110) does recognize that he is not at all sure that the operational indicator he developed in Patterns of Democracy is satisfactory
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suffers from the lack of a reasoned choice for the best indicator.15 Finally, using averages
is problematic if there are many missing values, as for instance in the case of central bank
independence.16
The nature itself of an institutional dimension is not always clear. For instance,
while the coding of the federalism/unitary state is relatively clear-cut, the coding of
countries on the centralised/decentralised dimension is quite unclear, even questionable.
In addition, Lijphart takes into account “sociological federalism” (or consociationalism,
where power is shared between elites of ideological/religious/ethnic pillars). This concept
is unrelated to the idea of vertical power sharing between two territorial levels, the state
and the regions. Hence, the surprisingly relatively high score of the Netherlands that,
according to most authors, is a solid unitary and centralised country. Consociationalism
by itself, especially if institutionalized like in the case of Belgium17 could be considered
as a specific and separate form of power sharing, and thus relevant to Lijphart’s
distinction of consensus/majoritarian democracy. However, consociationalism is difficult
to operationalise in comparative analysis (Bogaards, 2000).
Finally there are the ad-hoc “educated guesses” or “intelligent estimates”
(Taagepera, 2003) of values that may well be unreliable if other researchers for other
reasons would attribute different values (cfr. corporatism scores for the 12 countries not
included in Siaroff’s 24 country analysis18 (1999) as well as the scores for judicial
15 In the case of closely allied parties he develops four sound criteria for identifying such parties, but then fails to apply these criteria for the cases considered. For instance he gives the score of 1.5 to the three traditional Belgian parties that since the 1970s have radically split into two fully autonomous Flemish and Francophone parties and should be counted separately. Following his four criteria, the German CDU/CSU should be categorized as one single party, which he still gives a score of 1.5. 16 One the Cukierman-Web-Neyapti index and the Grilli-Masciandaro-Tabellini index values range from 0.69 to 0.16 (range=0.43, with respectively 3 and 18 missing values) while the governors’ turnover index rate only ranges from 0.47 to 0.27 (range = 0.20, with 23 missing values). No country has values for both the latter indexes. Hence, the mean for a country sometimes represents only the turnover rate (a variable that varies over a much shorter range), while others are based on a combination of the first and second (that have a much wider range), or the first and the third. Lijphart should have taken these different ranges into consideration and standardized them, by equalizing the empirical maximum and minimum value of each index. 17 According to the Cultural Pact (1974) all ideological tendencies should be proportionally represented in all cultural, educational and media public bodies. 18 Table 5.3 is entirely invented by Lijphart, there are no references to external sources. He does not give a clear criterion for distinguishing between High, Medium or absent. Why are they seven, not more or less, dimensions? Many cases are wrongly coded. For instance, why does Belgium, that has the oldest and most successful green parties, does not score on post-materialism, while Germany does?
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activism19. Ad hoc “intelligent adjustments” are also frequent when empirical
operationalisations produce values that seem extreme to Lijphart’s intuition.20 The need
to make all these adjustments should have served as a warning signal that the indicator
itself may not be valid and the real cause of counterintuitive findings.
Surprisingly, in spite of these numerous problems of operational concept validity
and measurement reliability, very often the use of better institutional indicators does not
seem to affect the overall impact of these institutional dimensions on system output
factors, and thus upholds Lijphart’s main conclusions regarding the policy impact of
patterns of democracy.21
IV. Relevance of Lijphart’s indicators to regional democracies
A third question is whether the indicators Lijphart used for studying countries are
relevant for regional democracies. One can distinguish three main questions :
1) Which dimensions are not relevant, because a state level institution (usually) does
not seem to exist at the regional level, like a second chamber? If not, are there
19 Regarding the presence or absence of judicial review, Lijphart uses apart from the institutional rule that when the constitution and an ordinary law conflict, there exist court or a special constitutional council outside and independent of parliament that interprets the constitution; he adds three degrees of activism in the assertion of this power by the courts, or in other words, by the vigour and frequency of its use by the courts, especially supreme and constitutional Courts. It is however not at all clear how he has measured judicial activism, which is a behavioural variable difficult to operationalise in three categories. 20 Lijphart makes the average of two measurements of cabinet duration, and for 11 out of 36(!) cases enhances or reduces the country scores. For instance, the US and Switzerland are "impressively" brought down to minimum (=1); the strongest cases are topped off, truncated at 5.52 arguing that no country can have more dominant executives than the UK. There is no good reason why a country could not obtain a higher government stability than the UK, nor have an executive that is even more predominant than Downing Street over Westminster. Finally, the scores of some other countries are “impressively" brought down or up (the score of France is doubled). These adaptations seem quite arbitrary, and go far beyond common practice in comparative analysis of truncating extreme values (Lijphart, 2003:21). In addition, the theoretically maximum possible duration varies between countries. In some countries, the parliamentary mandate lasts three years, in others five. In the first case, one will by definition find more “governments” than in the latter case. All these adjustments should have served as a signaling that the indicator itself may not be valid and the cause of his counterintuitive findings. 21 In my course on Comparative Politics taught at the Katholieke Universiteit Brussel and my seminar on Comparative Methodology at the Université Catholique de Louvain, I ask my students to improve Lijphart’s indicators and test whether this enhances or weakens the association between institutional dimensions and some output indicators. Up until now we have not encountered a blatant case of shift in the pattern of relations.
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functionally equivalent indicators that can be developed for autonomous regions
for such dimensions?
2) Are there indicators exclusively relevant for autonomous regions?
3) Are there indicators relevant for the regional as well as the state level not used by
Lijphart (like direct democracy)?
Dimensions that are not relevant, because a classical state institution usually does
not seem to exist at the regional level, include:
1) a second chamber.22 As second chambers find their main legitimation (and often also
their historical origin) in the representation of subordinate political levels, regions do not
seem to require such forms of territorial sub-regional representation (although one could
theoretically envisage the need for a regional senate representing provinces, counties,
cities and communes).
2) regions do not have central banks (apart from the Bank of Scotland), probably because
a proper currency and monetary policy would make regions very vulnerable to
international speculation. Regional central banks are probably not viable institutions.
3) regions do not seem to have formal federal structures, guaranteeing constitutionally
the division of powers between the regional and sub-regional levels. However, the second
sub-dimension of territorial power-sharing, centralization vs. decentralization is equally
valid for states as for regions. Regions can adopt neo-centralist (Seiler, 1994:26) or
integral-federalist structures of power sharing between the regional and sub-regional
political entities.
Regarding the indicators that are exclusively relevant for autonomous regions, we
can envisage:
1. the degree of formal constitutional autonomy of the regions vis-à-vis the state-wide
institutions (regionalism, autonomy, federalism);
2. the degree of policy competencies of the regions vis-à-vis the state wide institutions,
22 At least in Europe, as in the US, all states apart from Nebraska have bicameral legislatures.
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including fiscal autonomy;23
3. the degree of regional tutelage over lower level political instances (Loughlin, 2001);
4. the degree of formal and actual involvement of regions in EU policy making,
including the EU regional policies;
5. the degree of institutional adaptation of regions to EU integration, for instance the
establishment of a committee for European Affairs in the regional assembly (NORPEC)
allowing for power sharing between the regional, state and EU levels.24
Finally, regarding indicators that are relevant for the regional as well as the state
level but that were not used by Lijphart, we find:
1) the degree of direct democracy instruments: referenda, popular initiatives, etc (Budge,
1997, Vatter, 2002);
2) the (dis-)proportionality of the financing of political parties and the (non-)regulation of
public financing of parties (Bergman, Müller, Strom & Blomgren, 2003:144-145);
3) the concentration or not of power within the parties : concentration of leadership,
degree of leadership competition and stability, organisational (de-)centralisation, (de-)
centralisation of candidate selection, participatory rights of members (cfr. variables used
by Janda, 1980; Rihoux, 2001) ;
4) the existence of normative instruments limiting the concentration of power in male
hands : (party and official) quotas and alternation in candidate list (IDEA, 1998);
5) the cumulation of mandates (between the regional, national European levels),
pathways of political careers of the mandated (cursus honorum, topdown parachuting into
the regions, endogenous regional level careers, or non-structured pathways and level
hopping);
6) the political independence of public administration: party-politicisation in the high
level functions of regional administration, role and autonomy of regional civil servants in
the elaboration and implementation of public policies, the use of Weberian hierarchical
administrative organisation vs. the principles of performance of « new public
23 While the actual use of policy competencies of the regions, for instance degree of regional spending vis-à-vis the national state spending, constitutes an systemic output variable. 24 The representation of the region by a bureau in Brussels (Marks & Haesly & Mbaye, 2002) constitutes an output variable.
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management » (Private Public Partnership, the use of external auditing, etc.,) ;
7) the degree of pluralism and political independence of (regional) media: the coverage
of major (regional) dailies and the role of the media in shaping public policy.
The exclusion of most of these additional power-sharing institutions by Lijphart
in Patterns of Democracy is probably due to the lack of comparative research in these
fields, even at the state level, with the exception of direct democracy and gender power
sharing.
V. Data aggregation problems Lijphart aggregates his ten dimensions into two meta dimensions, the executive-
parties and federal-unitary meta-dimension, on the basis of the results of a varimax
orthogonal rotated factor analysis.
The first meta-dimension includes four variables that are logically causally
dependent: majoritarian electoral systems usually lead to high disproportionality and thus
favor two-party systems, that are logically strongly associated with the occurrence of
single party majority cabinets, that are quite stable governments (and thus suggest strong
executive predominance over the legislature). A strong proportional electoral system
usually leads to multiparty systems, requiring coalition government, that tend to be less
stable (Gallagher, Laver & Mair, 2001:365).25 Hence, four of the dimensions of the first
meta-dimension are logically interconnected and high correlated (Taagepera 2003:1).
Apart from corporatism that is not theoretically linked with the electoral system,
three of the first five dimensions can be changed by simply modifying the electoral
system. This suffices to produce more consensus or majoritarian arrangements in terms of
party system, cabinet composition and government stability (strong executive
predominance over the legislature). Hence the “Does consensus/majoritarian institutions
matter?” question can be reduced to: “Do electoral systems matter”? Given the fact that 25 Also the variables on the federal/unitary dimension are logically linked. Large and/or heterogeneous countries will tend to adopt a federal structure, have a second chamber for representing the regions, a constitution that is difficult to modify (by the central state), have a non-partisan and active judiciary, and independent central bank. All these are arrangements to limit the power of the central state, and thus empower the regions.
17
we also indicated that party system, executive power sharing and government stability are
outcomes that, apart from electoral rules, do not depend very much on institutional rules,
and thus are out of reach of institutional engineers.
From an institutional engineering point of view, it is therefore regrettable that
Lijphart does not concentrate on the second meta-dimension, that contains five
dimensions that are highly institutional, and rightfully also operationalised on the basis of
the occurrence of rules (apart from the (sub-)dimensions of
centralization/decentralization and judicial activism). Also, the variables on the
federal/unitary dimension are logically linked and to a lesser extent26 empirically linked.
Large and/or heterogeneous countries will tend to adopt a federal structure, have a second
chamber for representing the regions, have a constitution that is difficult to modify (by
the central state), have a non-partisan and active judiciary, and independent central bank.
All these are arrangements aimed at limiting the power of the central state, and thus at
empowering the regions.
Surprisingly, the association between the second highly institutional meta-
dimension and Lijphart’s system output variables are extremely weak (except for
inflation, incarceration rate and social expenditures). Thus, while contrary to the first
meta-dimension, the five dimensions of the second meta-dimension offer many entry
points for institutional engineering, their manipulation may be expected not to make a
difference for regional system outputs. They simply do not seem to matter.
VI. Alternative theoretical approaches While typologies of democratic political regimes are numerous in political
science, few take such a large number of institutional arrangements into account as
Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy. Most often typologies or classifications take into
account one or a few variables (the most classical typologies refer to the relation between
the executive and the legislative power). Some theories divide the group of democracies
in sub-groups on the basis of a single dimension (corparatist vs pluralist regimes, 26 The average correlation between the first five dimensions is r²=0.21, while the latter five dimensions average r²=0.36. Taagepera (2003:12) even argues that the latters’ correlations vanish when one removes the five federalist/decentralized countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, Switzerland and the USA).
18
Schmitter, 1979), partitocracies vs. non-party polities (De Winter, Dellaporta &
Deschouwer, 1996), or on the basis of two dimensions.27
A main but logically similar multi-institutional approach is veto player theory. Its
basic premises are that institutions can be understood in terms of the number of actors
who can block (“veto”) a policy change. The more veto players there are, and the more
their preferences diverge, the harder it is to change policy (Tsebelis, 1995; Bawn, 1999).
Hence, the logic is very similar to power sharing or consensus seeking between
institutional actors of the consensual/majoritarian model. The more the veto players, the
higher the number of institutions that have to be heard in policy formulation, and thus the
wider the number of preferences that have to be taken into account in order to arrive at a
decision, and the broader the consensus on which this decision has to be based. The veto
player model is however much more difficult to operationalise than the
consensus/majoritarian model. Not only does one have to – like in the Lijphart model –
map the institutional power that different actors have in a polity, one also has to identify
their preference for the degree of policy change vis-à-vis the current status quo. In veto
player theory, preferences for policy changes are presented in a spatial model of
preferences in which policy alternatives are represented by utility functions defined on
that space, whereby the “ideal point” of an individual (institution) is the policy s/he
would choose if s/he could make the decision unilaterally (read in a fully majoritarian
way), and any policy alternative is evaluated in terms of distance to this ideal point. One
can presume that the differences in ideal points increases with the number of institutional
veto players, which narrows down the possible policy outcomes of negotiations between
veto players. A multitude of veto players may lead to policy blocking unless there are
central steering actors that would streamline and coordinate these ideal points, as would
be the case in fully-fledged partitocracies. Hence veto player theory can be considered a
27 Cfr. Almond’s (1956) typology based on political structure and role structure, distinguishing between Anglo-american, continental European, pre-industrial and totalitarian political systems. In his earlier works on consociational democracy, Lijphart (1968, 1969) defined a typology on elite behavior (coalescent vs. adversarial) and social structure (heterogeneous or homogeneous) generating a two by two typology of depoliticized democracy, centripetal democracy, consociational democracy and centrifugal democracy.
19
rational choice sophistication of consensus/majoritarian democracy, albeit with gigantic
complications for empirical comparative research.28
Another line of comprehensive theory about institutions is the theory of
delegation and accountability (Strom, Müller & Bergman, 2003). According to this
theory, (parliamentary) democracies vary in the way they organize the delegation of
power from “principals” to “agents”, e.g. from voters to elected, from parliament to the
cabinet, from the collective cabinet to individual ministers, and from ministers to civil
servants. In a democratic chain of delegation, each delegate should be held accountable
by its principal for the decisions taken “in their name”. A variety of ex ante and ex post
control mechanism can limit agency loss at each stage of the chain of delegation and
secure a democratically sufficient degree of accountability. The degree of delegation and
especially of accountability is affected by actors external to the chain: constitutional
courts, auditing offices, sub-national entities, corporatism, instruments of direct
democracy, and instruments of combating agency loss due to information problems,
moral hazard and adverse selection (Strom: 2003:86).
While delegation and accountability theory clearly includes multiple institutions
and inter-institutional arrangements, it has up until now not led to comprehensive
typologies of democracies. One could classify democracies according to the degree that
agency losses are limited or widespread at each stage, and consequently the degree of
policy preference divergence between the initial principals in a representative democracy
(the voters) and actual outputs produced at the end of the chain of delegates (civil
service). In practice, D&A theory has not empirically addressed this overall question.
One of the main problems of building a typology of democracy on the basis of this theory
is that agency loss can occur at many moments of the chain of delegation and
accountability, and thus many deviant cases from the ideal type of perfect delegation and
accountability can be envisaged. However, by carefully studying the problems of
delegation and accountability at each phase of the chain and its institutional constraints
and facilitators, D&A theory can contribute to consensus/majoritarian approach in fine-
tuning our comprehension of the autonomy/dependency of each actor, and thus the
28 In a critique of Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy, Armingeon (2002:86) labels the last five dimensions the meta dimension of “counter-majoritarian institutions” or “veto players”.
20
degree of real power-sharing that occurs between democratic institutions (for instance
between parliament and cabinet).
VII. Conclusion The basic idea of this research project is that the dichotomy majoritarian vs
consensus democracy developed in Lijphart’s seminal Patterns of Democracy is a useful
conceptual and methodological tool to understand the nature of democracy in
autonomous regions, albeit with many modifications. These modifications are due to the
specific nature of autonomous regions as political systems, as well as to shortcomings in
Lijphart’s theoretical and empirical concepts.
The relevance of Lijphart’s work to democratic theory and practice is that
democracy is not limited to the state level, but can be extended to sub-state (regional and
local) and supra-state levels (European Union), as well as to democracy in non-territorial
public and semi-public decision-making bodies, like parties, interest groups, the media,
the judiciary etc. Especially in the latter group, concentration of power is viewed as
hazardous to democracy (cfr. the negative connotations of partitocracy, corporatism,
mediacracy and the république des juges).
Due to a twin process of devolution of state powers to the regions as well as the
recognition of the relevance of the regions in a multilevel system of European
governance, regions have gained in the past decades in relevance as an arena for
democratic decision-making. Their recent nature and the subsidiarity challenge (that
matters are better decided at levels closest to the citizenry) has led many regions to
innovate democratic processes and institutions. Our research aims at mapping these
institutional arrangements, as well as their intentions, i.e. policies more susceptible to and
congruent with public preferences.
21
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