Ben is joined by Professor Steffen Ganghof from the University of Potsdam to discuss his book Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism. Steffen discusses an alternative model of democracy he calls “semi-parliamentarism” which can gain the benefits of presidentialism in having a part of the legislature independent of the government, without investing executive power in a single person. And the best examples of this model can be found here in Australia.
Our conversation has relevance to debates around the role of Australia’s upper houses and is a fresh outside perspective on how they improve Australia’s democracy.
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The transcript is below the fold.
Ben: Welcome to the Tally Room podcast, I’m Ben Raue.
There’s often a lot of discussion in Australian politics about the purpose and role of our upper houses. Australia’s colonial upper houses were created in the 1850s, mostly as conservative bulwalks to the more democratic lower houses. But since then they have evolved into very different institutions.
My guest today has written a book looking at how a how a particular model of democracy can pair the best features of parliamentary and presidential democracy. The best examples of this model can actually be found here in Australia, and our upper houses play a crucial role in that model.
My guest today is professor Steffen Ganghof. Steffen is chair of comparative politics at the University of Potsdam and the author of Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism. Hello Steffen.
Steffen: Hi Ben, thanks for having me.
Ben: Thanks for coming on. So most analysis of democratic structures groups democracies into two main categories. You’ve got parliamentary systems and presidential systems.
In the former system, you have executive government relying on a majority in parliament diffusing power within the party or parties that make up that majority. But usually that means that the executive government has a majority in the parliament and it makes it hard to have independent checks and balances within that institution.
Under a presidential system, executive power is given to a single person with a separate democratic mandate from the legislative body. The parliament is not necessarily controlled by the same parties that make up the presidential administration, and thus it’s more feasible to have the legislature check the power of a president.
And there are some countries that have a semi-presidential system, where power is split between a president with an independent mandate and a prime minister responsible to the parliament.
But there’s a less well-known, less common model that Steffen you’ve called semi-parliamentarism and that’s the topic of your book.
Many Australians would think of the political system we have in most of our jurisdictions as a parliamentary system. But why do you think this different model of a semi-parliamentary system fits better?
Steffen: Yeah, so usually when people classify countries or systems as parliamentary they just ignore the upper house or the second chamber. So in what you just said, you also said you know in a parliamentary system, the government is accountable to parliament.
So most people, when they classify these systems, when they talk of parliament, they only mean the lower house or the first chamber. And that makes sense because most upper houses or second chambers are inferior to the first chambers. So they don’t have the same democratic like legitimacy. They’re either non-elected or they’re indirectly elected. So they’re in some sense inferior. And this is I think how this convention has emerged
But what I’m arguing is when you have upper houses or second chambers (I prefer second chambers because if they’re equally legitimate then there isn’t really an upper or lower). So if the second chamber is basically equal, or the members have equal legitimacy to the first chamber, then I think you cannot really do this.
Then you have to think of parliament as the entire parliament, and then you have to realize that well only one part of this parliament, the first chamber, has this right of having a no confidence vote and removing the government from office, while the second chamber does not have this right. So the second chamber actually relates to the government as it would be in a presidential system. It is a properly separated branch. And that’s why I think semi- parliamentary is actually an apt term.
Ben: In your book you list a bunch of examples of jurisdictions that fit this model most of which are in Australia, either the Australian federal system, but most of the states as well. Not Queensland, that’s only got one chamber but the rest of the Australian states and Japan as well. Why is it that they get included in this category while so many other countries that also have upper houses don’t fit in that category?
Steffen: So there are a number of categories that don’t fit. So first, as I just said, a lot of upper houses or second chambers are not directly elected, so they don’t fit. Then we have a couple where they are directly elected but the second chamber also participates in the no confidence vote against the government or has a no confidence vote.
Italy is a good example. So in my view Italy is really a properly bicameral parliamentary system because you have two directly elected chambers, although there are very few members in the Italian senate that are not elected, but it’s overwhelmingly directly elected. For me that makes sense, if you have a directly elected parliament so both chambers should have a vote of no confidence against the government, and that’s the Italian model. So that is a properly bicameral parliamentary system.
There are a few cases which I didn’t include um for various reasons. So for example in Poland or the Czech Republic you have directly elected chambers but their veto rights are very limited. So you can override their veto with an absolute majority in the lower house. So in a different way again, they are inferior. They’re not equal chambers.
Ben: So it’s partly about the constitutional power of that upper house being having some strong power but not the ability to decide who forms government. But it’s also about the kind of question of, I was going to say almost a cultural power, but it’s derived from the voting system which is part of the constitution and the power.
But the method of election gives them a certain legitimacy or lack of legitimacy to intervene. Which may not line up with its theoretical power, right? An upper house that may have theoretically a great amount of power but not much democratic legitimacy and thus doesn’t exercise that power wouldn’t fit into this model.
Steffen: Exactly. But the the main or only reason or primary reason why it couldn’t act on this power is a lack of legitimacy. For example, the Canadian senate is a classical example which has a lot of formal power but because it lacks legitimacy it cannot really use this power. So legitimacy is really the key variable.
Ben: I’ve thought a little bit about this since I read your book about what creates that legitimacy. Because we’ve had experiences in Australia where the upper houses, when they were first created, a lot of them were not democratic. They were either not elected, or if they were elected they they had a more restricted franchise. They were a property franchise or women got the right to vote later or something like that.
That meant that generally they leaned in a conservative direction and we’ve also had examples more recently with the Senate in the 1970s when the federal government actually was sacked by the Governor-General because the Senate blocked the budget from passing. Which actually is a rare example of them actually being able to remove a government. But it was seen as an extraordinary constitutional crisis, not a regular act of government.
But what I found interesting about those is it seems to me like, for this model to work that upper house needs to be needs to toe a line of not being a complete rubber stamp of the lower house, but not being completely obstructive of it either. If it has something about the way that it’s elected. If it’s going to perform a role of Independence from the lower house that’s independent but not preventing government from functioning, it seems like there’s a there’s a particular balance it needs to strike.
Steffen: That’s exactly right. So in practice it’s exactly about this balance. But what I argue in the book, or what my position is, is that this balance is largely a matter of design. Partly constitutional design and partly just electoral design.
So one way in which, and this is the Australian model of course, one way in which you avoid this, or you try to avoid this obstructive second chamber is to have proportional representation which makes it more unlikely. Especially also if you have concurrent elections it’s more unlikely that you get the opposition bloc, like a unified opposition bloc, to have a majority in the second chamber. That’s the most problematic situation.
This is something that you sometimes had in Japan and these were always really very difficult situations in Japan. But there are two other factors that are really important in terms of a more detailed design. So one point that you mentioned is a budget veto, right? If you have a budget veto it can be used as a de facto no confidence vote. And that is why Victoria and New South Wales of course have abolished the budget veto. So there the legislative councils do not have an absolute veto against the budget.
So that’s one factor and that is a problem also in Japan because they can de facto veto the budget even though they don’t have legally the constitutional right to do that.
The second important point is the dissolution of these chambers. So if you have the mechanisms of a double dissolution, if the second chamber the upper house becomes obstructionist it can potentially pay a price. So this is how you can create balance. For example, Japan is a really problematic case in this respect because there only the lower house can be dissolved and the upper house cannot.
So the when the opposition had the majority in Japan in the upper house they could be completely obstructionist, they could really try to remove, as in Australia in the constitutional crisis of the mid-70s, they could try to remove the government from office without paying any price themselves.
So it’s really a matter of constitutional fine print there.
And that’s also why it’s going to be really interesting with the recent reform in Western Australia. I mean, now Labor has ah big majorities in both chambers but given that you now have proportional representation in one large district it’s going to be interesting because in Western Australia you do have a budget veto and the legislative council cannot be dissolved, right? So in Western Australia it all depends on how this proportional representation is going to work. But this fine print is important.
Ben: I’ve been thinking a little bit about Western Australia, but also in the context of New South Wales where we have quite a proportional upper house but have that added element that only half is up for election at the same time. Which often means the half that is elected at the same time as the Assembly is roughly broadly in line with the politics of the government that’s elected but not of the same party.
You know, if you get a conservative government in the lower house, you usually get a conservative majority in the upper house but not all of the same party which I think works quite well because it means they’re not completely opposed to the government’s agenda but they’re not going to rubber stamp it either.
But the element that’s complicated is because you have that other batch that’s elected four years earlier, we saw that with the election that happened recently. A Labor government was elected in the lower house in minority but there was a clear progressive majority in the lower house once you factor in the other people elected. In the upper house the new members were clearly progressive but then there was a much more conservative batch from 2019 that’s still there and Western Australia is not going to have that.
So I think probably they will probably end up with an upper house where, you know, if the state elects a Labor government there probably will be a progressive majority in the upper house but not a Labor majority. You know we see in New South Wales now, we’ve got Animal Justice Party and Legalise Cannabis and the Greens and people like that making up their balance of power.
Steffen: No exactly and I think it’s a very important point and it’s also actually a point where, I think, where real disagreement exists between different scholars who roughly like the model that I’m sketching.
So I’m a big fan for the reasons that you just mentioned, I think the best model…if you think about the system in terms of semi-parliamentary democracy then there should be equal term length and there should be concurrent elections for the reasons because then that’s a democratic situation where, exactly as you just mentioned, it’s unlikely due to proportional representation that the government has a majority in the upper house.
But, you know, you don’t have members elected four years earlier that can sort of obstruct the agenda or they are not aligned with the current mood in the electorate. So I’m a big fan of that. But if you think sort of more classical models of second chambers as sort of checks and balances they emphasise much more the idea of having unequal term length and having non-concurrent elections. So there’s a real difference there.
Ben: Sometimes with upper houses there’s an argument about they need to be different from the lower house otherwise what’s the point of them existing. And in this case of the Senate we have the fact that it’s elected by state and it’s not equally apportioned so, you know, differently sized states elect the same number. And that is a difference.
And then sometimes it is that longer term limit as we have in South Australia and New South Wales and and the Commonwealth. The big difference has turned out to be, over the last few decades we’ve introduced proportional representation in these upper houses starting with the Senate in the 1940s and most of the others were in the 70s and the 80s and then Victoria in 2006. That’s become the real difference, is PR.
One of the great things about that is it doesn’t really, it’s not…the traditional upper houses of the nineteenth century were different to the lower house but they were kind of consistently more conservative. You know it was a clear bias. Whereas the PR difference…it’s not that the upper house is more conservative or more progressive. It’s differently structured rather than having a particular bias one way or the other. Those old conservative upper houses would only really constrain one side of politics and and not the other.
I’m curious as well though, because I know with your book you talk about the case studies that already exist and most of those are in the Australian context and I know there’s a lot of countries around the world that have that more classical parliamentary democracy or have that presidential system, and there just aren’t as many examples of this and so you use the examples you have.
But you haven’t just limited yourself to just the specific case studies. we currently have existing. You’ve kind of talked talked a little bit about other experiments that could be performed around trying semi-parliamentary democracy that’s not constrained to the things that we’ve already tried in Australia or Japan.
Steffen: Okay so, the main purpose of the book was actually that, right. So I tried to explain, sort of, in a way to the rest of the world what kind of model exists in Australia and why that’s interesting.
And it’s interesting in different ways. So maybe let’s start with presidential systems. So, one goal of the book was to to tell people, you know, the the debate about presidentialism and parliamentarism has usually been that political scientists look very skeptically towards presidential systems. They think they’re dangerous, hey think they’re the reason why a lot of democracies in Latin America for example have been unstable. And then there has always been this debate, okay, if you want to change this you have to go to a semi-presidential system, to a parliamentary system.
What I’m saying in the book is that actually you can get everything you want from a presidential system with this Australian model because in a sense the election of the lower house is also a leadership election. You have a candidate for prime minister. And if you design this well it is almost like a presidential election but parties remain in control in a way before the election of the prime ministerial candidate and also after the election. If there is a problem, if there is some corruption scandal, as I think you had in New South Wales a while back, the premier just resigned. And this is not possible because otherwise if she hadn’t resigned she would have been removed. That’s impossible under a presidential system.
So that’s one main argument I make to the people that think about reforming presidential systems I say, well there is a model which you can design it in a way where it looks like a presidential election. And if you want to do it this way I would actually argue, and that’s really a new way of thinking about this, I would say you could actually elect the lower house without having single member districts because single member districts are a problem also for fairness and they’re also a problem because increasingly in today’s world they’re going to create hung parliaments because minor parties will also make inroads in lower houses depending on geography and so on.
So you could have lower houses that actually use one at-large district and give voters a clear choice between either two parties or two pre-electoral coalitions and then it’s pretty much comparable to a presidential election but parties remain in control.
Ben: It’s been interesting in the context of conversations around proportional representation in Australia, because in most of the jurisdictions in Australia we have PR but not for the the lower house, the house that decides who forms government, makes up the majority of parliament, it frankly has more influence over the business of government even though we do have upper houses that are quite important.
And often the argument does come back to, well the upper house plays that role and I would think sometimes when I look at the semi-parliamentary model there’s a certain logic about single member districts having a better chance of producing a one-party majority and having the upper house elected by PR providing a difference that then allows that upper house to express this independence.
Whereas about a decade ago, 2010, we had an election in Australia which was hung and the Greens formed an alliance with Labor and that then meant that any legislation that was getting through the house was coming to the Senate basically with a pre-agreed majority and so the traditional role of the Senate in holding up business and considering it, having committees, having inquiries, you know, potentially rejecting legislation, didn’t really happen because anything that made it to them had already been agreed to basically.
So there’s a little bit of me that wondered sometimes, like, if we did have a proportional House and it elected multi-party governments, those multi-party governments probably would have a better chance of winning a majority in the Senate than our current system where we have single party governments that don’t win a majority in the Senate and does make me wonder whether the Senate could still perform that role.
But do you think you could design this in a way that both houses are elected proportionally but they don’t end up producing kind of parallel majorities that effectively mean if one alliance controls government they also control the second chamber?
Steffen: I mean that’s really also one implication of the argument that I make in the book. I don’t think that the model would make any sense anymore if you had proportional representation, especially if you had similar types of proportional representation in both chambers. And let me step back here because that’s really important.
So the first point I made was about presidential systems. Now look at the parliamentary systems and it’s really important to understand the downsides. So if you have a parliamentary system with only a single chamber or an inferior second chamber, everything comes down to how you design this electoral system, right?
So you have two choices. You can have a major majoritarian system like a classical Westminster model or a very disproportional PR, or you can have a very proportional system and what you see around the world and that’s really important to understand in my view, also with respect to the current waves of democratic backsliding.
So if you if you opt for a disproportional electoral system in a parliamentary system, a majoritarian Westminster-style system. You can decide between the left or right government, you have clear clarity of responsibility and so on.
But you have a fairness problem. And you’re also, and it’s really important, you have a higher chance that also extremist parties, authoritarian populists, can gain power of government. And it’s important to see there’s a lot of research, if you look to Türkiye if you look to Hungary, in all of these countries authoritarian populists gained majorities or even supermajorities even though they did not have electoral majorities.
So with disproportional electoral systems, democracy comes into danger and this happened in Poland and Hungary and Türkiye and many countries. So going on the disproportional side is dangerous now.
But if you go to the proportional side, you have two problems. If you look to the Netherlands or Israel you see it becomes very difficult to build governments, you have fragmented governments. You also have in Israel right now, if you have extreme parties in the government coalition, again that becomes an issue. And the problem is in the parliamentary system, a crucial point, if you have PR in the chamber that has a no confidence vote, right, you try to have a fixed coalition agreement because you need to stabilize the government.
And so that also makes, you know, legislative coalition-building about individual bills very difficult and you can see this in Germany right now where the three parties that make up the coalition they have a lot of disagreement so they’re fighting all the time and it’s very difficult to have a coherent program.
So what is unique about Australia is that you can say, you put PR, that’s crucial, you have to put PR into the chamber, the upper house, which does not have a no confidence vote. Which allows you to you know, have a clear decision, do I Want to have a centre-right or centre-left government. And it can be still can be a pre-electoral coalition. So that’s another issue, can be a Labor government or Labor-Green coalition. But you still have some flexibility in the second chamber to build individual coalitions on individual bills and this is what what I show in my book.
This is the model, right? So, for example, Labor governments can often choose. Either they go with the Coalition which they often do. If you look at divisions, for example, they often make bills with the Coalition. But if they have a left majority then they can rely on the left majority. So they can shift from issue to issue with whom they want to build coalitions. And in a world in which we are now, where we have multi-dimensional conflicts, we have fragmented parliaments, we have a certain degree of polarisation, this flexibility, I think, is an asset. And this flexibility gets lost if you put PR in the chamber which has a no confidence vote.
Ben: It’s easy to see how it works when you have a non-proportional system. But you mentioned Türkiye and Hungary. There’s less of a danger with a disproportional system if you have that upper house that is elected on a different basis, is that part of the logic?
Steffen: So if you have two separate branches then, you can have a properly disproportional system. So I think it makes a difference, for example in Hungary or Türkiye. In Hungary you had a sort of mixed member system.
The asset in Australia is that you have a properly ranked choice system, you have alternative vote, right? So second and third preferences count. And that allows the electorate to coordinate, for example, against extremist parties. And this effect would even be stronger if you had it in one at-large district.
Think about the presidential elections in France, right? There was always, or we had several elections where the extremist candidate Le Pen was against the centrist candidate and the entire democratic spectrum could coordinate around this centrist candidate.
So disproportionality is not equal to disproportionality. a proper two-round system or a proper ranked choice system allows sort of the democratic centre to coordinate effectively. And that is only possible if you have separate branches because in a parliamentary system you cannot have these ranked choice or two-round systems, not simultaneously with electing the parliament.
I think that’s a really important point. So the separation of powers is what allows you to do this, to have a ranked choice system in the first chamber and a proportional system in the second chamber.
Ben: Do you see any other countries considering this kind of approach, of like moving towards a second chamber with that sort of greater democratic legitimacy, separate from a first chamber that chooses a government. Are you seeing anyone else considering this kind of approach?
Steffen: Not really, I don’t think we’re there at all yet. I mean I wrote this book because I think there’s just a lack of understanding around the world of how these models work. So I’m trying to prepare the ground for this. Also, again, it’s a good question because you ask me about how I think about new ways of designing semi-parliamentary systems. I think establishing a new second chamber where it doesn’t already exist is very difficult. But once you’ve once you’ve understand understood this model you can think about it differently.
So what the semi-parliamentary model does is it questions the idea that all members of parliament, which usually you think should have equal rights, that all members of parliament should have the right to participate in the no confidence vote.
So in one chapter of my book I argue, for example in Germany or in a country like Israel, what I would recommend to them and I think it would really be helpful for a country like Israel, I would argue we should limit the no-confidence vote to a committee of parliament. That’s how you can think about it, that the confidence vote should not be given to everyone, should be limited to a committee, and you can design an electoral system in a way where this committee is only composed of the two largest parties or the two largest electoral blocs. But this committee is embedded in a proportional parliament.
So, voters can with their vote in a ranked choice system simultaneously determine the composition of the committee and the composition of the overall parliament. So what you would have is sort of, you would have a stable government, you would have a clear mandate, you’d have a centre-left to centre-right government, but in the parliament as a whole it would have to act like a minority government and find additional support for its bills and there would be additional checks and balances.
And that’s my point, that is essentially what you’ve done in Australia without really wanting to do this. And that’s why I would also say if you want it from my perspective. If I would make suggestions about how to improve the Australian model I would make the upper houses bigger and the lower houses relatively smaller.
I would recognise the fact that the upper houses shouldn’t be seen as afterthoughts. They are the actual parliaments. They are the the places where deliberation and you know detailed discussion of bills and so on happens. So these should be the stronger institutions whereas the lower houses should be seen more as confidence chambers. Their main purpose is to select the government or allow voters to select the government. And they are the checks on the prime minister and the cabinet by being able to remove them if they’re departing from the mandate or the party or line or there are corruption issues or whatever.
Ben: It’s really fascinating because there’s never really been a moment where someone sat down and designed these systems. You know, they evolved over centuries. They were developed in the nineteenth century with a particular purpose in mind, that purpose has now faded and not only are the people who made those decisions no longer with us, but their political successors were defeated. You know, like the people who run governments now are not the successors of those political movements. Things have moved on since then.
And in the Senate you know like there was a push in the early twentieth century to make it proportional, it didn’t succeed. For about 50 years the chamber was largely dysfunctional didn’t do anything and then they eventually introduced proportionality and kind of revived these chambers. But I think it was partly an effort from Labor parties to prevent their conservative opponents from controlling these chambers. And the fact that they became more legitimate and had more authority kind of took them by surprise and wasn’t really their intent.
We’ve sort of evolved into something that works. I still think that that there are other reasons why we might want to have a proportional lower house and I wonder a little bit about whether you could capture some of this by having one chamber be a lot more proportional than the other chamber or something like that.
But doing some of the things that sometimes get talked about around having low-magnitude proportionality or something that means you’ve got a chamber that has a handful of parties and then a chamber that has a lot of parties and a lot of diversity.
I find it really fascinating and I find it really interesting as an Australian who this political system, I think for a lot of the people listening to this podcast, that’s the only one that they’ve ever been familiar with. Understanding both how peculiar it is but actually that people from overseas might see that it has this greater value outside of the Australian context for other countries.
Steffen: Yeah I totally agree there is this path-dependent development. But I think it’s also important to realise that it’s not accidental, right? I mean the actors or the constitutional designers have learned over time. There is a sort of convergence, and that’s also what I try to show.
I mean there’s a reason for those convergences and it’s really important to realise that for example in Victoria in 2003 or in Western Australia recently the Labor parties would have had the power also to try to abolish the upper houses and they decided not to. And they decided to move to this model of proportional representation.
I think there’s a reason for this because it is a stable equilibrium that has certain nice properties. So while there is a path-dependency, it’s not accidental that you ended up where you ended up.
And I understand this impulse of having proportional representation in the lower house. It’s going to get too complicated, but in chapter 8 of my book I actually sketch a model where, you know, the idea of having this confidence committee. You could design a system where the size of this confidence committee is actually determined endogenously. So if you think about it. So if the two big parties go it alone and only they make it up on the confidence committee, this confidence committee is going to be limited by the number of proportional seats they’re going to win.
But if, for example, Labor and the Greens decide to have a pre-electoral coalition then this pre-electoral coalition is going to be counted for this confidence committee. So then the Greens would be part of the confidence committee if they decide to make a pre-electoral coalition and then the size of the confidence committee relative to the entire parliament would increase.
I think what you want, to have a proportional upper house and still have proportional representation of the lower house is also something that you could design, but design in a way where you want to use a confidence chamber or the confidence committee in my view to give voters a clear choice between two alternative governments. And they should be pretty sure to get either of these two governments.
I think this is something we should think about. The model really loses some of its charm if you end up with hung parliaments all the time. And if you have proportional representation in two chambers and, you know, you have some sort of coalition building in the lower house and then more coalition building in the upper house you really lose a little bit of the charm.
Ben: I see the argument. I think it’s one that I want to think a little bit more about but I definitely see the point and I also do see the value in having that different approaches for both the upper and the lower.
So that’s about it for this episode of the Tally Room podcast. Thank you Steffen for joining me.
Steffen: Thanks Ben it was fun.
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