Differenteate between old and modern democracies
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old democracy is similar to modern democracies in that it grants a broad portion of the public a say in governance. old democracy in that only free men could vote. the voting occurred in a single forum, and there were no mediating delegates.
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Taking old democracies to be those countries that have been continu-ously democratic since before the early 1990s and new democracies to be those that have democratized since this time, it shows that there are institutional differences between them. There has been a redistribution of regime types, with a decline in the number of parliamentary regimes and a rise in the number of semi-presidential regimes. This shift means that new democracies are more likely to have directly elected presidents and that there are now more complex patterns of political leadership than before with a greater emphasis on presidential/prime ministe-rial relations. In addition, the fragmentation of party systems in new democracies and the prevalence of proportional electoral systems has helped to generate a higher turnover of prime ministers in new democ-racies. Generally prime ministers in new democracies tend to be weaker than their counterparts in old democracies. That said, it is important not overemphasize the differences. Within the set of parliamentary democracies patterns of decision-making are recognizably similar in both old and new democracies. The same is true for presidential and semi-presidential democracies. Equally, even if the redistribution of regime types has generated changes in the general patterns of political leadership over time, there is variation within any given regime type and in any country across time. For example, even though there has been a general rise in semi-presidentialism, there is variation in the 13 Political Leadership in Old and New Democracies Robert Elgie L. Helms (ed.), Comparative Political Leadership© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2012
Political Leadership in Old and New Democracies 273patterns of decision-making within the set of semi-presidential democ-racies. Overall, while institutions create incentives for actors to behave in certain ways, their effect is not deterministic. The redistribution of regime types has generated new patterns of leadership, but there is always room for particular patterns of decision-making authority in any particular country. An institutionalist approach to the study of political leadership This chapter adopts an institutionalist approach to the study of polit-ical leadership (Cole 1994; Elgie 1995; Helms 2005). While institutions can be understood in many different ways (Helms 2013), this approach interprets institutions as sets of formal rules and established procedures. Institutions are not actors. Only people can act. However, institutions structure the behaviour of actors by providing incentives for them to behave in certain ways and to refrain from behaving in other ways. These incentives are not deterministic. Actors can always depart from them. Even so, an institutionalist approach places more emphasis on identifying the behaviour that is induced by institutions than on the idiosyncratic behaviour of human agents. 1 Institutions are privileged in this way because they are considered to induce incentives that are both systematic and regular. They are systematic in that the incentives can be clearly identified. For example, a first-past-the-post electoral system produces a strong incentive for the emergence of a two-party system. They are regular in that the incentives are general and not context-specific. So, all else equal, a first-past-the-post electoral system produces such an incentive everywhere and at all times. The result is that if insti-tutional incentives can be correctly identified, then institutions can be used to explain and, indeed, predict political outcomes. Shepsle (2006, 29) puts it as follows: ‘outcomes are clearly implied by the configuration of rules in a structured institution. These rules prescribe the mecha-nism for aggregating behaviours into a final result. Thus, any combina-tion of behavioural repertoires by institutional politicians maps into a specific outcome.’