INTELLECTUAL ODYSSEY

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE

NOTE: These recollections focus on my intellectual development and how the different strands in my life's work relate to each other. They are being written while I'm in a hospital bed recuperating from a broken leg. That means I cannot consult documents to verify dates and facts, but ultimately I will fill in the gaps. Moreover, I have promised my family a real autobiography which, I hope, will be an elaboration of materials offered below, including more personal and anecdotal information. As an intellectual rather than a personal history, however, this first draft will take up the following themes:

• 1. Childhood in China -- a multi-cultural context
• 2. University Years -- intellectual foundations
• 3. Comparative Public Administration -- the CAG experience
• 4. Conceptual and Terminological Problems -- the COCTA experience
• 5. The Focus on Ethnicity -- the emergence of ETHNIC-L
• 6. Presidentialism and Parliamentarism -- the COVICO Experience
• 7. Globalization, Development, Social Science and Information
• 8. Retrospection -- a look back with contributions from old friends and colleagues
  

Note that underlined words and phrases link to related texts, but underlined numbers in brackets permit jumps to the citation for a text -- use the BACK button to return to this text.

In a recent note, Baaklini offers some background information that can help us understand the circumstances. which prevailed when we met. They hinged on the fact that before the Sandinistas lost their majority in the National Assembly, they had adopted a "basic law" which confiscated nationalized land and gave it to some of their leading supporters. Such laws could only be repealed, under their constitution, by a two-thirds majority which was not possible since the Sandinistas still held more than a third of the seats. However, the U.S. announced that it would stop economic aid until this legislation had been reversed. To frustrate any efforts to reverse this legislation, the Sandinista members of the NA decided to boycott all its sessions, an action which denied the majority any possibility of getting a quorum and, consequently, made all their actions "unconstitutional." The Sandinista-sponsored Supreme Court upheld this interpretation, providing a pretext for Sandinista members of the assembly to boycott the AID-sponsored conference which they themselves had helped to organize .

Some of the problems inherent in the separation-of-powers design became apparent the following year when a tidal wave struck Nicaragua and destroyed many home communities for the Sandinista members of the NA. While they went home to help cope with the disaster, the anti- Sandinista majority was able to convene the NA and amend the controversial law. When the returning Sandinistas appealed this action on the grounds that the NA, again, without their presence, lacked a quorum, the anti-Sandinistas responded that because of the separation of powers, the Court had no jurisdiction over the internal rules of the assembly which had the right to determine its own rules of conduct. The Sandinistas have countered that although the Court cannot make rules for the Assembly, it can revoke decisions made by the NA in violation of its own rules. Thus the many serious difficulties confronting that unfortunate country have been compounded by a constitutional formula that hampers the resolution of issues of grave importance.

Although the Constitution inherited from the Sandinista's followed the basic guidelines of a separation-of-powers regime, a single dominant party had been able to control all three branches. In the new set-up, the Supreme Court was composed of long-term Sandinista appointees and the Sandinista's in Congress had become a formidable opposition. Although they had helped plan the conference which was supported by U.S. AID, they decided to boycott it and so we met without them. It was apparent that President Violeta Chamorro would face growing problems in the effort to establish viable democratic government in Nicaragua.

In this context, Abdo and I began to talk about some of the serious problems faced by all regimes organized on the basis of the separation-of-powers. After I returned home to Hawaii, I had the good fortune to become well acquainted with Tom Gentry, a wealthy business man who was sympathetic to my concerns and volunteered to make a grant to the University of Hawaii which enabled us to hold a small conference in June 1994. The participants agreed that it would, indeed, be useful to remain in touch and to recruit others to discuss with us questions about the design of constitutional democracies that had a good chance of surviving. With this in mind, we established an e-mail list called COVICO-L, and I was also able to put a section for COVICO on my Home Page.

We held two follow-up conferences, first in Albany in March 1994, and a second Hawaii conference in January 1995. The first led to a book [1997a] -- all dates in brackets refer to items in the attached check-list. COVICO-L remains viable as a global e-mail list -- its members are identified at: list

Unfortunately, we have not been able to secure the necessary support for follow-up meetings. Tom Gentry, our patron in Hawaii, died after a tragic speed-boating accident. We have, however, been able to sponsor guests panel at annual conferences of the American Political Science Association, organized by Kent Weaver of the Brookings Institution. Otherwise, COVICO remains an e-mail list able to support a continuing dialogue among its members on problems of constitutional democracy.

Personal Background

My own interest in the constitutional problems of presidentialist and parliamentarist democracies started long before the Nicaragua meeting. It stems, in a roundabout way, from my earlier work in Thailand and my follow-up studies of military coups. I began to see after I left Bangkok that having a coup was not an exceptional thing experienced only under Siamese conditions. Rather, it was a political process that occurred with growing frequency in the new states created by the collapse of the world's industrial empires, commencing after World War II.

They were likely to occur in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and island states everywhere. However, these were all independent countries created after they had obtained their independence from imperial rule. They did not experience coups while they were subject to imperial domination. Imperial control was strong enough to maintain its authority over the armed forces it depended on to perpetuate its power. Exceptions, like the sepoy mutiny in India were unsuccessful. It was no accident that the first successful modern coup occurred in Thailand, an independent state, in 1932. Here the forces of modernity had greatly enhanced the capacity of public officials (military and civil) to organize power in a centralized way, and the absolute monarchy was unable to maintain control over insurgent public officials.

Thus a coup occurred when a bureaucratic cabal, led by military officers but including coopted civil servants, overthrew the existing regime and established a dictatorship: I called it a bureaucratic polity rather than a military regime because it normally included civil servants without whose support and involvement the armed officers could not govern. Moreover, I found that civil servants shared the same grievances as military men when a regime could not govern effectively, could not pay their salaries or assure the status and support they wanted. Thus the motive for revolting was shared by all public employees.

The hierarchic structures of bureaucratic organization provided a framework for the coordination of coup planning and execution, while the leadership of military officers supply the instruments of violence needed to seize power. Contrary to much of the existing literature on the role of the military in new states, I did not find that the ambitions or greed of military leaders could explain successful coups. As vulnerable humans, military men shared the same motives as a wide range of non-military people -- what enabled them to seize power was their ability to coordinate the use of violence for political purposes during regime crises.

I saw the explanation for coups as a context of regime collapse and growing popular discontent. For coups to succeed, they need widespread public support and, I think, they are often motivated by patriotism, a sense that unless they intervene, a collapsing regime would lead to anarchy and civil war -- thus they saw themselves as saviors of their country. However, they did not understand that without institutionalizing structures for democratic accountability, they would fall into the traps of arbitrary rule and political failures that would re-generate the grievances that led them to rebel against the regimes they overthrew. This accounted for the frequency of counter-coups in which a new group of disaffected military officers would conspire to overthrow an existing coup-based regime.

Sometimes, as in Thailand, members of a coup group recognized the importance of having democratic institutions as a means of mobilizing popular support. From the beginning, the Siamese "promoters" of the 1932 coup proclaimed their commitment to creating responsible governance, and they proceeded promptly to organize parties and establish an elected parliament. However, popular support for parliament was weak and the non-governmental civic groups that empower legislative bodies in modern democracies did not exist in Thailand at that time. It took more than half a century for them to evolve and give that country its contemporary democratic institutions in 19??. Meanwhile, however, the coup group was able, through the cabinet, to dominate all the formal departments of government.

The Thai regime established after 1932 was, in fact, a highly prismatic bureaucratic polity. Its prismatic nature took the form of two contradictory formalisms. It not only used the facade of parliamentarism to legitimize its authority at home but, even more importantly, to rationalize its claims for international recognition and to preserve its independence at a time when imperial conquest (especially by the British and French) really threatened them. It also preserved the facade of monarchical authority which also facilitated international recognition, but even more importantly, it mobilized widespread domestic support, especially from the peasant masses where the acceptance of a king's sacred authority remained vibrantly alive. Both of these facades contradicted the reality of bureaucratic (military) rule but they also served important political purposes. They enabled the new rulers, despite a succession of counter-coups, to rule their country more successfully than most of the regimes created by coup groups in other countries during the following years.

Regime Collapse

The basic reason for coups in the new states of the world created by the collapse of imperial control could be found, I believed, in the basic incapacity of the new regimes to govern. Although they normally had a facade of democratic institutions when they gained their independence, the reality was that these institutions were flimsy and unable to govern effectively. Of course, that need not have surprised anyone. Under imperial domination, external conquerors were interested in exploiting their possessions, not giving them the means to govern themselves or become independent. In most cases, it was not until the eve of independence, when the imperial powers saw their ability to govern dependencies dwindle -- and they also realized that maintaining control was economically unprofitable -- that they attempted, finally, to create a semblance of self-governing institutions to whom they could surrender power.

Tragically, some imperial powers -- notably Portugal and Belgium -- simply abandoned their possessions when they realized they were no longer viable. Without even a semblance of organized governance, these new regimes quickly fell under the weak domination of military officers, or even bandit chiefs whose inability to govern led not so much to counter-coups as to endemic civil strife and violence, as we see in Congo today.

By contrast, some imperial regimes were more responsible. The British had, very reluctantly, turned some real powers over to the Congress-dominated Parliament in India before independence, and the American regime in the Philippines installed a Filipino Congress shortly after conquering that country. I believe this helps us understand why military groups were unable to seize power in these countries

In the possessions where revolutionary movements conducted a prolonged struggle for independence, the leaders of these movements were able to dominate their states when they finally gained their freedom. Virtually all the post-1917 revolutionary movements followed the Soviet example by creating single-party dictatorships. These ruling parties were able to mobilize popular support, at least to some degree, and to maintain enough control over their bureaucracies to avoid coups.

In a great many of the new states, however, fragile democratic institutions were created on the threshold of independence, and they were able to stay in power, at least nominally, for a number of years. Sooner or later, however, they encountered serious problems that they could not cope with and their regimes became seriously discredited. Simultaneously, the public bureaucracies in these countries, and especially their armed forces, had become relatively well institutionalized.

Two main reasons could be mentioned. First, the new states inherited the colonial bureaucracies, civil and military, that had been established by the imperial powers to govern their possessions. Although imperial conquerors relied to some extent on their own nationals as soldiers and often used mercenaries recruited from diverse source, they came increasingly to depend on less costly local personnel. At first they used these people only for subordinate posts where they could not afford to pay high enough wages to attract recruits from the imperial homeland. Gradually, however, the number of locals in the public services of imperial possessions increased and even became politically active. Thus, when independence came, the rudiments of a national bureaucracy were already present in many of the new states.

A second factor involved international technical assistance and foreign aid programs, sponsored by the United States and other established states, as well as the UN and other international organizations. Although they were separately organized, efforts were made through military support missions to bolster and train the armies of the new states, and through civilian agencies, to improve their ability to train and manage civil servants. My own work at the Public Administration Clearing House had put me in touch with many of these public administration training and development programs.

They were all deliberately non-political in orientation. By this, I mean that they were avowedly indifferent to the way power and authority were organized, arguing that to take any position on these matters would involve political interference, something they needed to avoid in order to gain acceptance by the new regimes. Of course, there was also ignorance -- no one had any knowledge of how to help a country create political institutions that could be both responsible to the public and govern effectively.

The result was, of course, that under the guise of a "non-political" process, bureaucracies were strengthened and politically empowered. Western theories of public administration were predicated on the prior existence of politically effective regimes that could, in fact, maintain effective control over their public employees (military and civil). In this context, it made sense to focus on management methods and tools without worrying about politics -- public administration and military doctrines both presupposed a non-political framework designed to help existing regimes enhance their capacity to manage public affairs. In the context of new and fragile regimes, including authoritarian bureaucratic polities like the one I saw in Thailand in 1957, I believe foreign aid helped create civil/military bureaucratic structures that were able, at times of serious crisis, to seize power and rule a country in arbitrary, irresponsible ways. The multiplication of "military" regimes in the new states seemed to me, therefore, to be a consequence of the simultaneous weakness of political institutions and the growing strength of bureaucratic structures (military and civil).

Regime Types

In this context, I thought I could test my suppositions by collecting empirical data on the experience of many countries. I turned to the Political Handbook of the World, an annual compendium of information about every country and its political history that is prepared at SUNY/Binghamton by a research team headed by Arthur Banks, an old friend and colleague from our days together at Indiana University. Reading through the entries for every new state, I saw that increasing turmoil occurred before each military coup took place. This confirmed my impression that regime weakness rather than military ambitions were at the root of the coup phenomenon. No doubt coup leaders are ambitious men, as are civilian politicians. However, they also share patriotic motives. The explanation of coups should not, I concluded, focus on the motives of coup leaders but rather on the political situation in the countries where they seize power.

Having said that, I began to code the political structure of regimes in the new states and made several discoveries that startled me and led to new thoughts about presidentialism and parliamentarism as important institutional variables. At first, however, I looked at all the new state regimes (including the older third world countries of Latin America which had gained their independence a century earlier than the new states of the 20^th century). What I discovered, first, was that some regimes never experienced coups, while others did. I found that the coup-less countries fell into several groups.

First, there were a few where democratic institutions had been institutionalized well before the achievement of independence -- there were very few of them, but they included India, the Philippines, and Jamaica.

Second, there were a few monarchies, such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Brunei, Bhutan, and Morocco. In these countries traditional beliefs remained strong and, in most of them, oil revenues enabled the rulers to extend benefits to their subjects without having to tax them.

Thirdly, there were a substantial number of one-party dictatorships, ideologically Marxist and historically rooted in revolutionary independence movements. In these cases, it seemed apparent that the political regime, though for quite different reasons, had strong enough roots to govern with moderate effectiveness and maintain control over its public employees. Of course, these two factors are closely interdependent -- maintaining control over officials is a necessary condition for motivating them to administer well enough to legitimize the regime and avoid the serious crises that lead to coups.

Although a few one-party dictatorships and monarchies did succumb to coups, I found that the most vulnerable regimes were those that had adopted democratic constitutional systems on the eve of independence. However, I discovered a significant difference between them on the basis of the constitutional design that they followed. Virtually all the countries that had copied the American presidentialist (separation-of-powers) plan had experienced coups: in a few cases presidents usurped power but only with strong military support (the Philippines under Marcos and Peru under Fujimori are leading examples).

By contrast, I found that the new states which had adopted parliamentary constitutional designs were less vulnerable. A significant number had, indeed, experienced coups, but a majority had not. Without making any judgment on the relative merits of presidentialist and parliamentarist regimes when they are working well, it struck me that the former type of system is more fragile and, therefore, more vulnerable to collapse during serious crises. My findings on this matter were first reported in [1984], followed by a more detailed analysis in [1993a]. In several follow-up articles, I have elaborated on my theories about the fundamental fragility of presidentialist regimes: [1995], [1997b] and [1997d] and, most recently, in [1998a] -- see the draft.

My early impressions were confirmed by the later findings of others. Adam Prewjorski ?? and his associates, on the basis of a sophisticated statistical methodology, found that the prospects for survival of parliamentary government was significantly higher than that for presidential (separation-of-powers) regimes. Although he talks about a variety of economic and social factors that may contribute to this finding, he does not examine the inherent problems of constitutional design that affect the viability of constitutional democracies. An even more recent study by Jerzy Wiatr ?? of all the post-communist regimes offers further confirmation -- he found that those that adopted parliamentary constitutional principles were much more successful than those that followed the American model. Wiatr's findings reinforce my opinion that the collapse of democratic governments in Latin America could not be explained by cultural, social, or other environmental forces, including the external impact of American intervention, a long-term reality ever since the Monroe Doctrine established a form of pseudo-protectorate over the countries of Hispanic America. What all these regimes shared was a constitutional structure based on the separation-of-powers.

Defining Presidentialism.

This fact led me to think that we should look more closely at the actual workings of presidentialism in order to explain why American-type constitutional systems were so fragile. To do this, I found it necessary to struggle with some terminological problems, especially how to find unambiguous terms for any concept when the existing terms for it are ambiguous -- see Chapter 4. I decided not to use presidential because in many contexts this word refers to the office of the President, rather than a regime time. Even presidentialist can be ambiguous because for many scholars this word connotes a high level of presidential power -- in this sense, only recent Imperial Presidents in the U.S. have manifested presidentialism -- earlier administrations were presidential but not presidentialist. To overcome ambiguity, I resorted to the use of separation-of-power as an equivalent, sometimes using the word pleonastically, i.e., in parentheses after presidentialist. However, this is cumbersome and so, in the rest of this chapter, let me use presidentialist to mean any constitutional system based on the separation-of-powers principle.

Actually, I think a neologism could represent this concept more clearly and easily -- in [1969], long before I realized the basic difficulties inherent in the presidentialist design, as spelled out in [1984] -- I proposed a scheme using the word, tonic, to represent the balance between the polyarchic (political) and the hierarchic (bureaucratic) organs of modern governance. I suggested using prefixes to designate the different possible constitutional structures, and recommended isotonic to represent the equal status of the branches in a separation-of-powers regime. I elaborated on and defended the utility of this idea in [1970a] and [1971]. However, my naive hope that these suggestions might be acceptable were soon dashed. I discovered that widespread resistance to neologisms blocked acceptance of my work and so, reluctantly, I decided to abandon this precise nomenclature and revert to the more familiar though ambiguous established terms. These experiences also fueled my efforts to work internationally on conceptual and terminological problems -- readers of Chapter 4 will see how Giovanni Sartori and I joined forces in 1970 to establish the Committee on Conceptual and Terminological Analysis (COCTA) in the International Political Science Association.

When I tried to find out from the literature what made presidentialist regimes so fragile, I found that the answers are not easily available. Most students of presidentialist regimes adopt an area studies (idiographic) approach that focuses on single countries, offering an immense amount of data: historical materials describe regime collapses but cannot explain them because they direct attention to a multitude of existing conditions without establishing criteria to decide which are decisive. This is especially true for students of the American regime who refuse to make comparisons with other presidentialist systems -- if they do make any comparisons, they are virtually always with parliamentary countries. If they speak of "presidentialism," they usually equate it with the (successful) American exception rather than with the normal (unsuccessful) experiences of the many other presidentialist regimes.

Developing and Testing Theories

Within Latin American studies, one finds little in the way of genuine comparative analysis. In principle, for example, one might compare the more successful with the less successful cases to determine what the key variables were -- e.g., to compare Costa Rica at one extreme with the Dominican Republic at the other. When the book, Failure of Presidentialism in Latin America, edited by Juan Linz and Arturo Valenzuela, was published (??), I hoped that it would provide some good answers -- actually, I attended the conference in Georgetown, May 1989, which produced the papers published in this symposium, and I argued for the need to make systematic comparisons in order to develop explanatory theories. Unfortunately, the findings reported in this symposium are inconclusive. Each chapter is a case study with idiographic data about one country and its experiences with little or no theoretical analysis.

By contrast, the long introduction by Juan Linz is highly theoretical but it bases its conclusions on comparisons between parliamentary and presidentialist regimes, using successful European cases, especially Spain, to support propositions about parliamentarism, while neglecting the United States and focusing on Latin America to explain the weaknesses of presidentialism. I found this method inconclusive. When the problems of presidentialism are to be explained, it is important to compare the most successful with the less successful cases, as noted above. If the U.S. has succeeded, then what were the practices that can explain this apparent exception to the rule proclaimed so vigorously by Linz that all presidentialist regimes are in jeopardy. To determine whether or not any American practice helped to sustain this country's democracy, we need to compare it with relevant practices in the presidentialist regimes that collapsed. Linz does admit in his essay that the American case is exceptional among presidentialist regimes, but he offers no explanations for this exception. Yet it is, I believe, precisely the reasons for this exception that can be used to explain why presidentialism in other countries has failed so often.

I offered some explanations in the paper on American democracy that I presented at the Georgetown conference, but my analysis was excluded from the follow-up book on the grounds that the book should focus on Latin America and the weaker presidentialist systems, making the American case irrelevant! I was pleased when Mattei Dogan and Ali Kazancigil decided to include my Georgetown paper in their book, Comparing Nations [1994a]. This essay built on an earlier study published in [1988]. I tried to identify by comparative analysis the features of the U.S. regime that had helped it survive without a collapse for over two centuries. Each of the distinguishing features that I found could be made a subject of comparison with other presidentialist systems. If they had the same practices, that would tend to show they did not explain the survival/collapse differences. But if they were different, then this might be significant. Unfortunately, since my analysis was published separately from the Latin American cases, it was more difficult to link them in a comparative way. Without going into detail, let summarize some of the key variables I had identified.

Proportional Representation

A common complaint in America involves the failure of many citizens to cast their ballots at periodic elections. One explanation is that they are alienated or apathetic and see no reason to vote. However, an underlying reason for not voting is the sense that it makes little difference which party's candidates win. They resemble each other so much, reflecting the preferences of educated middle class white people, especially males, that minorities, the poor and uneducated (and women, until recently) felt they had little to gain by going to the polls. I am not denying significant differences between the parties, but pointing to a wide-spread popular perception. Calls for a "third party" to provide new options have often been heard, but the third parties which have presented candidates have almost never won, confirming the popular perception of a "peas-in-the-pod" two party system.

I suspected that similar apathy could be found in all presidentialist systems where a majority vote is needed to secure the election of the president and minority parties are doomed to failure. Under these constraints, two parties may well evolve, each as a coalition of disparate political elements without a core sense of identity or political philosophy. Under these conditions, where fundamental ideological differences are lacking, candidates will be tempted to attack their rivals for their personal faults rather than their political positions. Such "dirty" politics further alienates voters who believe the charges and wonder why they should support candidates who may a rascals, as depicted by their rivals.

To overcome this problem, the most obvious solution involves proportional representation, but this only helps in the choice of legislators -- the president, by definition, runs in a "single-member" district -- even when there are run-off elections. By creating multi-member districts, however, several candidates many parties can enhance the diversity of views in Congress, and magnify the incentives for citizens to vote. This not just a theoretical speculation: in fact many Latin American countries have adopted different PR schemes and this did lead to great increase in voter turnout. I do not have the statistics, but this is a proposition that can be tested empirically.

And we can also determine the results. I believe that in parliamentary systems, since there is executive accountability and coalition governments can be formed to represent various legislative minorities, PR has a good chance of working well -- minority legislators have an incentive to cooperate in order to become part of a governing coalition and to secure some policy support for their concerns. By contrast, under presidentialist rules, the chief executive is elected for a fixed term and may even belong to a minority party facing a majority opposition in Congress. Under these conditions, even a Congressional majority may feel frustrated and turn, in anger, to the impeachment weapon, as we see in the attack on President Clinton by the Republican Majority in the House.

But imagine how frustrated small Congressional minorities must feel in a separation-of-powers regime. They never have a chance to become part of the government and, even in Congress, they may find that their demands are ignored. When this happens, they predictably become angry and obstructionist, making it harder than ever to secure majority votes in Congress for laws that address controversial issues. I believe that the experience of presidentialist regimes using PR voting systems has been uniformly disastrous: although they increase the size of the electorate, they undermine the viability of the regime. This is another proposition that can be empirically tested.

Mandatory Voting

The trade-off between popular representation and regime viability may be reinforced by another variable, namely whether citizens are free to abstain from voting. One solution to the problem of low electoral turnout is to make voting mandatory. Indeed, there are reformers in America who think we should adopt laws that compel citizens to vote, but so far, the prevalent practice in America is to make voting voluntary. Undoubtedly, compulsory voting would increase the turnout. But what would be the costs?

In Argentina compulsory voting was adopted early in this century, and led to a dramatic increase in turnout. This also had important consequences. Throughout the 19^th century, Argentina politics was dominated by parties representing the more affluent. The poor, including the whole working class, were not involved, although they had a perfect right as citizens to vote. Mandatory voting brought a great increase in popular voting which had a radical effect on the party system, leading to the rise of leaders and parties seeking the support of the poor. They promised programs to benefit the hitherto unrepresented classes. Of course, these programs were costly and involved tax increases. Ultimately, the leaders of these populist parties became more and more dictatorial, resulting in Peronism. Although Argentina had never before experienced coups, they now began to occur, and military authoritarianism arose with ferocious consequences.

I do not claim that compulsory voting was the sole cause of this change, but the history of Argentina and several other Latin American countries who followed the same path suggests that, although it does increase popular participation, it also undermines the viability of democracy. These considerations led me to think that the survival of presidentialism depends on oligarchic control of government. So long as Argentina had an oligocracy, it was able to maintain its presidentialist regime, but moving to popular democracy undermined the regime's stability.

When I first thought about how this might relate to the American experience, I had to conclude, reluctantly, that an important reason for the survival of democracy in America is its oligarchic character. Not only do the representatives of the major parties reflect the interests of middle and upper class Americans, but their need for large campaign budgets makes them vulnerable to the interests of wealthy contributors. Indeed, many of them must have private wealth of their own to help them cover campaign costs. Thus oligarchicness is a price that Americans must pay for the survival of democracy in America. In most Latin American countries, pressures for democratization in the sense of greater popular participation undermined oligarchic rule, but at the same time they contributed to the fragility of these regimes.

Legislative Power

These conclusions reinforced by my earlier research into the historical origins of legislative bodies -- see [1975a]. Parliamentary regimes, I found, evolved gradually as monarchic power was surrendered to elected assemblies, no doubt for different reasons and more or less gradually. In this process, the assemblies had become well organized with seasoned members and traditions before they gained the power to choose their own cabinet leaders and a prime minister. By contrast, presidentialist regimes in the 19^th century came into existence following revolutions in which an imperial power located overseas was overthrown. Although colonial powers sometimes permitted local advisory councils to exist, they had rarely been able to exercise any real power -- the American colonial legislatures were perhaps exceptionally powerful and this may help explain their post-independence effectiveness. By contrast, the new congresses in other states were inexperienced and vulnerable.

These remarks do not apply to the new polities originating after the mid-20th century, most of which are in post-communist countries. Although they have long had elected legislatures, their members have not had an opportunity to learn much, under single-party domination, about how a freely elected democratic assembly can be effective. The new states created by negotiation in empires with well-established parliamentary systems typically modeled themselves on their former "mother" country. Those who gained their independence after revolutionary struggles usually became single-party dictatorships.

In general, especially for all the new states of the 19^th century, it seems clear that when new legislatures were created, their inexperienced members had little understanding of what they could and could not do and how difficult it is to govern. Moreover, these new legislatures had no parliamentary models to follow -- they could not have imagined nor implemented a constitutional design in which they would select the chief executive and hold him accountable. As in the American case, they created elected presidents to replace hereditary kings -- except in the Brazilian case. The result was presidentialism, with or without the North American precedent -- even, eventually, in Brazil.

Moreover, the leaders of revolutionary movements were typically strong-minded and ambitious men determined to take control of the newly independent regimes they created, and they were often military commanders accustomed to the use of violence -- by contrast, George Washington was a relatively modest man who was pressured to become president, a post he did not claim and was glad to leave.

I believe the essential dynamics of conservative revolutions determined the outcome: a separation-of-powers regime. An important difference between the U.S. case and the others may depend on the personality and motives of their first presidents -- something that could also be studied empirically. In this context, the success of a new presidentialist state hinged on the ability of its president and congress to reach agreements. When they could not agree, a serious confrontation would lead either to domination of the congress, or to its dissolution -- any manager of a state bureaucracy, including its armed forces, could resort to violence to compel the legislators to go home.

In order to flourish the new congress in a presidentialist regime needs to be able to organize itself effectively and also be able to mobilize popular support. The most dependable support for an elected assembly comes from middle and upper class educated people. By contrast, support from poor and uneducated citizens is more problematic. It hinges on their ability to organize and act in concert, as do workers who have been able to establish effective trade unions. Politically, the equivalent of a union is a political party, but parties with a mass base are hard to organize.

No doubt the use of Proportional Representation greatly enhances the capacity of political leaders to mobilize poor people and ethnic minorities. However, as noted above, I believe that PR destroys the viability of presidentialist regimes. This poses a contradiction because having single-member districts favors the more affluent citizens. A second expedient to overcome the oligarchic tendencies of a presidentialist regime is compulsory voting. Since this practice enables dictatorial populists to come to power as presidents -- see above -- it leads to imbalance between the branches and seriously undermines the legislature, primarily by leading to hegemonic ruling parties. Such parties do permit weak but genuine opposition parties, by contrast with rule where no opposition is tolerated. At least, that is the conclusion I proposed in [1974].

The Need for Opposition

Having a political opposition is not only necessary for democratic constitutionalism -- more specifically, I believe it is a necessary condition for any legislature to be effective. Without a strong internal opposition, the decisions by an assembly will predictable. This is true under hegemonic as well as single-party rule. Decisions will then be made by the leaders of the ruling party rather than by the assembly which can only ratify decisions made externally.

By contrast, having an effective opposition means that legislative decisions cannot be confidently predicted, and both the president and interested groups have to defer to decisions made in the assembly. For this reason, I concluded that legislatures have a vested interest in protecting the rights of opposition parties -- indeed, they are the only institution in modern government that has such an interest -- see [1974]. Other institutions, including the presidency, the courts, and the bureaucracy, are willing to obey rules that protect civil liberties and free speech so long as a legislative body (with a strong opposition) is empowered -- but whenever that institution collapses, all other institutions are likely to insist that their preferences prevail and that opposition be suppressed. By contrast, to the degree that legislators understand that maintaining opposition rights is a key to their own power, elected assemblies will try to protect civil rights and political freedom. No doubt they often fail to understand this and, in the head of partisan rivalry, a majority party may endorse policies that unwittingly undermine the institutional power of their assembly.

It is important, I think, to distinguish between the rule of law and the protection of civil rights (notably the rights of a regime's political opponents). Rulers have long supported the rule of law as a way to enforce regime policies -- in this sense everyone must obey the law, whether this means compulsory military service, wearing safety belts or not littering. In Communist countries, the rule of law means that freedom extends only to activities permitted by the regime. Thus the rule of law can enable authoritarians to stay in power.

It can also, of course, safeguard democracy -- it is a double-edged sword. In a democracy, the rule of law includes the rights of free speech and assembly that enable opposition parties to organize. Although such rights may be prescribed in a written constitution, as they are in the U.S. Bill of Rights, their enforcement depends on the existence of a powerful institution that has a stake in the maintenance of opposition rights -- and I think only legislative bodies have such a stake. Without a strong legislature, all the rights that make democracy possible are jeopardized. No other institution, as an institution, benefits from the enforcement of civil rights although, when the right to oppose the government is safeguarded, all other institutions will respect protected civil rights.

Moreover, I think it is easier to safeguard the power of an assembly when it has the right to discharge the executive by a no confidence vote. When it has to live with a minority party president serving for a fixed term, the temptations on both side tend to put democracy at risk: either the executive will use violence to suspend the congress, or the congress will try to impeach the president (an extremely risky expedient that can, by itself, disrupt the regime).

Having said that, we must also recognize that, in order to maintain their power, legislators must be able to reach decisions. When bitter partisanship prevails, a congress may destroy itself by becoming unable to reach agreements on important legislation, tempting an impatient president (or military group) to intervene and suppress the assembly. Note that I am using congress to refer to any legislature in a presidentialist regime, by contrast with parliament to mean an assembly in a parliamentarist system.

Parliaments can afford to have much more partisan cleavages than can congresses because of their ability to form coalition governments which command the support of a majority of members voting on the basis of party discipline. In a congress, by contrast, since the president has a fixed term and cannot be removed by a no-confidence vote, the main external incentive for reaching agreements is absent. Instead, members must depend on their own willingness to compromise and reach agreements and party discipline in a divided government would spell disaster. Thus, while party discipline is generated by the dynamics of parliamentarism, it is incompatible with the requisites of successful presidentialism.

In the absence of the party discipline which assures support for the current Administration in parliamentary systems, members of a congress need non-partisan motives to supplement partisanship if they are to succeed. When they share similar values and interests, they are more likely to find a basis for compromise than are legislators whose ideologies and demands are far apart. No doubt there are many different reasons for legislators to disagree, but I think the most important reasons involve fundamental interests. For example, more affluent citizens are able to take care of themselves and make few demands on the state for public services -- they usually want their tax burdens to be reduced. By contrast, poor people need more help and make demands that can only be met by raising taxes. This puts them in sharp conflict when both the rich and the poor are represented in the same assembly. Under oligarchic rule, the more affluent citizens are well represented while the poor are not. Consequently, I believe, members of oligarchic assemblies are more able to reach agreements than are legislatures in which a broader political spectrum is represented. When powerful forces press for democratization, they lead to changes in the electoral laws (such as PR and mandatory voting) that reduce the capacity of a congress to reach agreements. By contrast, parliaments are able to reach agreements even when they represent a broad span of popular interests.

In addition to this underlying social factor, I believe the congress in a presidentialist regime is more likely to succeed if the political dynamics of inter-party relations are more centripetal than centrifugal. A party system is centripetal to the degree that party members are pulled toward the center, making it easier for individuals in different parties to reach compromises on legislation. So long as the members belong to and represent the middle and upper classes, their partisan differences can often be compromised. This is the normal situation, I think, in American politics and helps explain the relative success of the U.S. Congress and state legislatures.

The experience in Latin America seems to be -- and I need more information to support this supposition -- that even where two-party systems prevail, as in Venezuela, Colombia, and Uruguay, political parties are more populist and often rely on poorer people to win elections. The result is that inter-party dynamics in these countries are more centrifugal than centripetal -- they pull much more toward the extremes ("Right" vs. "Left") and make it extremely difficult for members of rival parties to compromise and reach agreements. The result, of course, is to increase the importance of executive leadership or even domination. When a Congress gets bogged down in partisan controversies, its resulting inability to adopt laws becomes a serious obstacle to effective governance. Presidents who feel a strong enough sense of responsibility for dealing with urgent policy issues are tempted to go it alone, to rule by executive orders and even to invoke emergency powers or arbitrarily dissolve the congress.

Party Indiscipline

The capacity of Congress, in the American system, to reach agreements with the president is enhanced by weak party discipline. More party discipline is especially destructive when the government is divided between an opposition majority and a minority president. Consider how the rise of Newt Gingrich and his Republican "Contract with America" increased the polarization the led to Republican solidarity against the Democrats in the recent House vote for articles of impeachment against the President. The Senate's bi-partisan agreement on rules for the conduct of the President's trial may well have signaled an understanding that the influence of the Senate as an institution hinged on its ability to achieve bi-partisan compromises. When the House managers appeared before the Senate, they always spoke of the "House" decision to impeach the president, but presidential lawyers uniformly referred to the decision of the "Republicans in the House". To succeed in the Senate, where a two-thirds majority is required to oust the president, more than a few Democrats must be willing to support the Republicans -- again, party indiscipline is a key to congressional power.

In any congress, like that of Chile, where party discipline prevails, agreements between ideologically divided (centrifugalized) parties may be difficult to achieve. Even when one party has a majority and can overrule the minority, its decisions are likely to be so divisive as to poison relationships and block agreements -- a problem that become especially acute when the President belongs to a minority party.

By contrast, when party discipline is very low, members only feel obliged to their personal short-run interests. Members of Congress are free to follow their "conscience" and seek support for their district and its more influential constituents: the priorities of national political parties are easily dismissed. The term clientelism is often used to describe this situation -- each member of Congress is seen as a patron whose re-election to office hinges on h/er ability to satisfy the claims of h/er clients and, thereby, to win their continuing support in future elections. Factions, consisting of patrons with their clientele, prevail over parties in such a context.

In both strong-party Chile and weak-party Brazil, the results have been disastrous. American parties, by contrast, manifest a kind of middle-range sense of (in)discipline. Although their party members unite on some issues, they fragment on others.

This reflects, I think, a tri-polar sense of commitment among members of the U.S. Congress. They do have a strong sense of partisanship and, on some issues, follow a strict party line based on decisions reached in party caucuses, as shown in the recent House vote on articles of impeachment.

However, they also have a keen feeling of obligation to do something for their home constituents. Regardless of party, members from Hawaii, New York or Kansas, will give a high priority to projects that benefit their local supporters. The result is to make pork a priority, subject to the willingness of members to support each other by "log rolling" tactics. Pork also gives the president a weapon to mobilize support for any controversial measure -- by promising help for a member's local projects, he can often win just enough extra votes to enable a particular measure to pass. However, such bargains are not so numerous as they are in a country with weak party discipline, like Brazil, where members of Congress may well vote against all presidential initiatives unless they get some kind of quid pro quo, a reward that needs to be renewed every time a presidential initiative is under consideration. Presumably in Chile, with strong party discipline, pork is less important or easily overcome by partisanship -- but I do not know what happens there.

Committees and Subgovernments

In addition to partisan and local considerations, members of the U.S. Congress are affected by the commitments they share as members of standing committees. These committees are very important in the U.S. and, in principle, in all presidentialist regimes, by contrast with parliamentary systems. Normally, in such systems, most bills originate in the cabinet (normally on the advice of senior bureaucrats) and are routinely adopted so long as the government controls a disciplined majority in Parliament. By contrast, even when Presidents introduce bills in a Congress, there is no reason to assume they will automatically be enacted. Instead, Congressional committees will carefully review every bill falling within their domain, regardless of where they originate, and report out those they support. Because every bill in Congress needs to win support on its merits, due to the separation-of-powers, the legislative work-load is far greater than that found on any Parliament's agenda where ruling party(ies) can endorse most Government measures with minimal debate. In order to overcome the burden imposed by its vast agenda, much of the committee-endorsed legislation in the U.S. Congress is adopted on a unanimous consent calendar -- i.e., it is approved if no objection is raised. This means that, for a great deal of legislation, committees really have the final word.

Although Congressional committees in the U.S. are organized on a partisan basis, they are subject to weighty considerations that arise from the interests affected, especially as they involve non-governmental organizations and government agencies, and the staff members of each committee also play an important role. They are able to decide what will satisfy or antagonize these interests that obviously cut across the lines of both political parties and local constituencies. The result is to produce what is sometimes caused "subgovernments" or "interest networks" of great complexity. Members of Congress become well informed and committed to policies that evolve in their committees as a third kind of loyalty.

No doubt there are other considerations, including the personal or idiosyncratic concerns of members. The recent bi-partisan decision of the Senate to accept a set of rules for the trial of the President -- as noted above -- seems to reflect another important consideration, institutional "loyalty," or perhaps an awareness of the need for compromise to maintain the power of the Senate. . When members as far apart ideologically and by party membership as Edward Kennedy and Philip Graham stand shoulder to shoulder to anchor these rules, it seems apparent that their sense of Senatorial identity (and interest) had become salient. Perhaps this sentiment is stronger in the upper chamber where members hold 6-year terms than it is in the shorter-term perspective of lower chamber members. Overall, one can see that, although the patterns of Congressional decision-making are complex and confusing, they reflect the confluence of a host of more or less rational and predictable forces no one of which dominates all the others.

Efforts by an opposition majority to impeach the president are extremely disturbing for this pattern of decision-making just because they heighten partisan loyalties, as revealed in the House decision to adopt Articles of Impeachment. Of course, this also hampered routine Congressional decision-making where bi-partisan compromises are so necessary. My guess is that the normal balance of partisan, constituency, and committee interests held by members of Congress have led to a kind of inefficient but ultimately viable framework for dealing with public policy issues in the American government. Any effort by a partisan majority to unseat the President by impeachment is certain to damage the prestige and power of the Congress. For more comments, see Future and Anachronism of Impeachment, or [1999a] and [1999b].

In order to understand why other presidentialist regimes have so frequently broken down, we need to study the balance of forces in their Congresses as they affect relations with their Presidents and the capacity of the regime to confront important problems and adopt relevant public policies to deal with them. I have not found such analyses in the reports on presidentialist governance in other countries and, I imagine, the reason is the lack of comparisons between the U.S. and these systems. Without such comparisons, the importance of the balance of partisan and other forces within Congress for regime survival may not be appreciated or understood.

Bureaucratic Power

To conclude this discussion, let me refer to another dimension of the presidentialist design that my own dissertation research on the repeal of the Chinese exclusion acts sensitized me to many years ago. My long-standing interest in Comparative Public Administration has also made this a major preoccupation in my work. My thesis showed that even in America officials, both career people and patronage appointees, do have an important influence on public policy -- a fact referred to above in my comments on Congressional committees. It sensitized me to the importance of bureaucratic power as a political force in all modern governments.

This view was powerfully reinforced by my study of coups in Thailand and, later, in many other countries, where bureaucratic domination had followed the collapse of regimes. I became convinced that bureaucrats not only affect public policy making in a democracy but may, indeed, become a ruling class. The American way of studying public administration, as I learned at the Public Administration Clearing House, simply proved unrealistic when looking at countries like Korea, Thailand, Nigeria, or Argentina where public officials, led my military officers, had seized power. My conclusion was that in all regimes, we need to understand the role of bureaucrats not only in the management of public policies but also as actors affecting the political process.

The popular slogan separating politics and administration may well express some kind of utopian ideal, but it is never a reality in any modern political system. I stress the word "modern" here because in pre-modern political systems there may have been no bureaucracies, or existing bureaucracies were dominated by kings and emperors in a way that is irrelevant for modern polities. What makes any polity modern, I believe, is a pattern of organization that links a polyarchic structure of representative politics with a hierarchic bureaucratic apparatus. The former is designed to mobilize support for government in exchange for being responsible and representative while the latter is needed to implement policies that evolve out of this process.

Dynamic Balancing

This dual polyarchic/hierarchic structure -- which I referred to as tonic -- is characteristic of all modern organizations, including those in the private sector as well as different systems of governance -- see [1975b]. This conclusion followed my earlier work on the political structures of governance as they related to the bureaucratic -- see [1967a] on political parties and [1974] on legislatures. Earlier, I had speculated about the dynamics of these relations in [1967b] in "political development," and [1971] on dynamic balancing as a context-based interpretation of the relation between administrative and political change. Unfortunately, Political Scientists tend to focus on the polyarchic components of modern governance while neglecting the bureaucratic parts as essentially "non-political." This view is reinforced by specialists on Public Administration who do focus on bureaucracies, but emphasize their instrumental roles and neglect their real political influence.

I argued that it is only when one studies the interactions between the political (polyarchic) and administrative (hierarchic) components of governance, and of all modern organizations, that one can really understand how each of these components works. I reached these conclusions during the late 1960s while I was still actively involved in work with the Comparative Administration Group (CAG) as reported above in Chapter 3 . An important episode for me was the CAG-sponsored conference on Legislatures in Developmental Perspective held at Planting Fields, New York, from 8-10 December 1967 -- and reported in [1970b]. In that context I started to think more seriously about how legislatures are related to bureaucracies and public administration [1969] and [1970a].

These experiences persuaded me that we need to understand both how bureaucrats are organized and affect political processes, and also how the polyarchic (political) sub-system is linked to the hierarchic (bureaucratic) apparatus of governance. However, it was not until after my work on the comparative analysis of successful coups, in 1984, that I was able to see how bureaucratic organizational patterns are significantly related to the way parliamentarist and presidentialist regimes operate.

My earliest formulation of these ideas can be found in a paper on "Bureau Power" I gave in Korea in October 1992 -- it was later published in [1993b]. This paper was also revised with adaptations for Southeast Asia and published in [1993c].

My Korean paper provided the foundation for the presentation I made shortly afterwards, in December 1992, before the Nicaraguan National Assembly -- it was called "Bureaucracy and Constitutional Reform." My experiences in Nicaragua, as noted above, led to the organization of COVICO (in cooperation with Abdo Baaklini). I later revised and expanded the Nicaragua paper at the COVICO conference held in Albany in March 1994. It was finally published [1997a] under the heading, "Bureaucracy and Viable Constitutionalism." I presented another version of this paper at a second conference in Korea where it was published in [1994b].

I developed some ideas on the implications of this theme for the U.S. in [1994c], and sought to generalize my theory of bureaucracy in a global historical perspective in [1994d]. COVICO co-sponsored a conference with Tokai University that was held in Honolulu in November 1994 at which I offered a theoretical statement on the constitutional implications of bureaucracy. It was later published in Japan [1996]. I also tried to expand the theory to take into account the problems of drone bureaucracies as they evolved in the context of single-party rule [1997c], but I need help from experts on post-communist regimes to develop this analysis. From this narrative, one can see how my the work on public administration in the CAG context during the 1960s evolved into follow-up projects to study bureaucracy in its political contexts, and later to see the implications of this analysis for understanding the problems of presidentialism. Now I will say more about the substantive conclusions that I was able to reach.

Retainers and Mandarins

The structure of bureaucratic organization is profoundly influenced by recruitment and working conditions: who is chosen to work for a government and, subsequently, what influences affect their conduct and motivations in office. When the American Constitution was written, bureaucratic recruitment in England (and America) as well as in other Western countries was based almost exclusively on patronage -- rulers selected friends, relatives and others in whom they had confidence to manage the affairs of government. After they received these appointments, incumbents typically wanted to perpetuate them indefinitely and organized informally among themselves to resist efforts to replace them.

Interestingly, Public Administration lacks an established term for this type of office-holder. I refer to them as retainers, using a word that originally meant the house-hold servants of a master but can also be applied to government when officials are the beneficiaries of patronage and hold their offices indefinitely, though with no assured tenure in office. They can be discharged at any time, but in practice are often able to retain their positions indefinitely.

When the American government was established, public appointees were all retainers in this sense. Until the present day, the majority of public officials in all the older presidentialist regimes, such as those of Latin America, are retainers. In America, by contrast, very important changes in the structure of the bureaucracy were made during the 19^th century and they help to explain the survival of presidentialism in the U.S. To clarify this proposition, I need to explain the alternative mode of organizing bureaucracies that evolved in Europe during the same period.

This system is most clearly illustrated by the British experience, although it has counterparts in other European countries. The bureaucratic transformation involved the replacement of retainers by career officials holding tenure who were recruited, at an early age, on the basis of competitive literary examinations. Because this mode of bureaucratic office-holding originated in China almost two thousand years ago, it is not modern but quite traditional. The Chinese term, mandarin, is aptly used to describe its modern forms.

The motives for this innovation were provided by the British imperial experience. As the activities of the East India Company expanded in India, the difficulties involved in maintaining control over a far-flung empire led to the adoption of the Chinese system for recruiting young men as career civil servants to administer the imperial possessions and activities in India. Late, in the middle of the 19^th century, the same principles were extended to England leading to the establishment of a new Administrative Class of mandarins in the service of the mother country. This transformation with far-reaching political consequences was facilitated by the support of upper-class Englishmen who saw that by limiting recruitment to graduates of the leading universities (Oxford and Cambridge) they would be able to displace many lower-class patronage appointees with members of their own class.

Both retainers and mandarins are able to exercise powerful political influence, though for different reasons. Their administrative capabilities differ a great deal, however. Mandarins are able intellectuals who become highly qualified civil servants after long periods of service. This enables them to exercise great influence on public policy while also managing public affairs competently. Their secure tenure means they do not have to waste time trying to protect their careers. By contrast, although some retainers do become experts as a result of long-term experience, their basic insecurity and eagerness to retain their posts leads them to put a lot of energy into "political" intrigue and activism that may hamper their ability to manage policies effectively.

The relevance of all this to regime type is that the fusion of power in a parliamentary regime permits the cabinet to maintain its political supremacy over mandarins while also benefitting from their advice and support. By contrast, in presidentialist regimes, the separation of powers leads to divided authority over the bureaucracy and frequent conflicts of interest between government agencies. Top administrators must be concurrently responsive to often competing claims emanating from Congress (especially its standing committees); from the President and top cabinet officials; and also from judges who are able to nullify legislation as being unconstitutional and hold administrators accountable for norms not attributable to the constitution rather than decisions by the Legislative or the Executive branch of government. Were the top levels of the bureaucracy to be staffed by mandarins, they would easily, I think, be able to dominate both the Executive and Legislative branches. Consequently, I believe, no presidentialist regime can survive and also maintain political control over a mandarin bureaucracy

A different kind of bureaucratic threat undermines the viability of presidentialist regimes that depend primarily on retainers. Above all, a retainer bureaucracy tends to be quite inefficient and easily corruptible. Moreover, they often become involved in patron/client networks that overlap and reinforce the clientelist politics of regimes with weak and numerous political parties. Perhaps most importantly, after the impact of modernity has greatly increased the complexity and interdependence of government operations, administrative failures contribute to the discrediting of regimes and lead, paradoxically, to coups when leading officials, especially military officers, feel they have the right and patriotic obligation to intervene and seize power.

The American Hybrid

By contrast with the situation in Latin American countries, the U.S. evolved a hybrid type of bureaucracy that is neither a retainer nor a mandarin system. The characteristics of this system are virtually invisible to Americans, however, because of their lack of a comparative perspective -- they simply assume that it is a natural and even universally relevant kind of bureaucracy. It evolved on the basis of two major transformations affecting the civil services -- the military services have a different history which helps explain why American Public Administration fails to see that the military is a part of the bureaucracy.

The first important transformation occurred during the presidency of Andrew Jackson when rotation was introduced. The "spoils" principle was used to justify the right of every new administration, following presidential elections, to replace retainers with new patronage appointees. The regular rotation of officials gave political leaders a means to reward followers and thus build a basis for winning elections. It also assured them of the loyalty of the officials whom they had appointed. However, it had devastating effects on the quality of public administration and increased the levels of corruption. This produced a reform movement which led by the 1880s to legislation (the Pendleton Act) that established career civil services in American government.

Although the British mandarin model (based on the Chinese tradition) was used as a starting point for the reform legislation, the final outcome was a uniquely American kind of system that differed significantly from both the retainer and mandarin models. This result was not deliberately intended, but evolved from the confluence of several forces. First, there was a deep distrust of the mandarin model as essentially aristocratic and geographically biased. If followed literally, it would have led to the empowerment of the eastern Ivy League colleges whose graduates who could more easily have passed the British type of scholarly achievement tests than could the graduates of the technical and vocational schools that had sprung up throughout the country in response to the incentives offered by the Land Grant legislation. Representatives from non-Ivy League states felt that a system like that used to recruit cadets for West Point would be quite "fair" and advantage their constituents.

To democratize recruitment and assure patronage for members of Congress, they demanded that the reforms legislation would required an equitable distribution of appointments among all the states of the union. Moreover, they opposed literary criteria and called for a type of technical examination that would recruit specialists qualified for particular kinds of administrative duties. These two criteria led to a new kind of official, they were functionaries. They were not to be university-bred generalists coming from a few leading (and expensive) colleges -- rather, they were to be recruited from humble middle class families distributed throughout the country. Their specialized training and posting led them to remain for long periods of time in one public agency. This contrasted with the frequent rotation of office experienced by mandarins which gave them more of an overview of governmental operations though less technical know-how in many fields of specialization.

The new class of functionaries replaced many of the in-and-outers in public service, but did not displace all of them. Political leaders insisted that they needed to be able to appoint congenial outsiders to implement their policies, including both partisans and experts, and they distrusted functionaries to be loyal staff members. A major division arose within the American hybrid system between the new and growing class of career functionaries, and the residual but powerfully influential class of in-and-outers. Public administration theorists tended to concentrate their attention on problems related to functionaries in the civil service -- ignoring both the in-and-outers and military officers. This gave them a fragmented and inadequate understanding of the overall role of the American bureaucracy.

In fact, I believe, the hybrid system is well suited for the management of a presidentialist regime, even though it reinforces the mal-coordination caused by the constitutional separation of powers. To some degree, integration could be provided by transients in public service whose political loyalty could be counted on because they had nowhere to go but out when their patrons left office. This meant that elected politicians could retain control over the bureaucracy and even bring into the public service exceptionally well qualified persons. Their experience in private organizations often help them the public/private divide, and also deal with problems of coordination that baffled many technically qualified specialist functionaries.

Such functionaries, moreover, do not pose a political threat to any presidentialist regime because their professional interests preclude political organization as "bureaucrats". Indeed, they typically have divided loyalties because they see themselves as professionals, sharing their expertise and interests with fellow-professionals in non-governmental positions and also at different levels of government -- federal, state, and local. This means that functionaries help bridge the inter-level gaps that necessarily arise in a federal system of government and they also facilitate cooperation between governmental and private organizations.

The result, of course, is that functionaries are not inclined to join any pan-bureaucratic movements to shape policy or control the government. Instead, functionaries were quite happy to regard themselves as non-political public servants and eschew all suggestions that they work together to help shape public policy except within the narrow domains of their own specializations.

New States of the 20^th Century

Presidentialist regimes born in the 20^th century do not share the prevalence of retainers as found in their 19^th century counterparts. In the Philippines, because of extended American domination, the new regime actually shares many features of the American bureaucratic system, though in a modified form. In countries where mandarin bureaucracies had evolved prior to the establishment of presidentialism -- I am thinking of South Vietnam and South Korea -- the new regimes quickly found themselves faced with monumental problems involving the control of established bureaucratic elites, peoples whose ideals and experiences had a Chinese mandarin background as re-shaped under French and Japanese imperial rule. In both countries, after a brave start, the first presidents found that their efforts to master the bureaucracy through political appointees were bound to fail. Without any established traditions for finding and posting dependable patronage appointees, they relied heavily on relatives and friends who quickly trapped them in a morass of corruption and incompetence. Their rule was soon discredited and led to military (bureaucratic) rule.

A more complex situation has arisen in post-communist regimes and I feel less qualified to comment on what has happened there. However, I start with the premise that the bureaucracies in states dominated by a Communist Party had properties quite different from those of either the retainer or mandarin models -- and certainly they were unlike the American hybrid system. Relying on the empirical discoveries of Merle Fainsod based on the Smolensk archives which were captured during the War, and on some more general theorizing, let me suggest that when a very large part of the population has been recruited for service by the government under the impetus of doctrines of nationalization of all productive property, and when a dominant party seeks to impose its ideology and values on officials without much respect for the technical difficulties and problems they face in their work, the results are likely to be highly dysfunctional.

The best word I can think of to characterize the mass of public servants in any single-party regime is drone. This word is used to identify male honeybees: they have no sting and produce no honey. By analogy, these officials have no incentive to work on their own initiative -- they may be expected to do what they must in order to survive while looking for opportunities to conceal hard problems and satisfy their personal needs at the expense of efficiency or effectiveness in the implementation of public policies. In Smolensk, as Fainsod reported, many "family circles" were formed to conceal failures and abuses of authority.

The effectiveness of party control as implemented by commissars appointed on the Manchu model (whether consciously or not I don't know) to monitor officials and punish deviants means that, under single party rule, there is no opportunity for bureaucratic revolts to succeed nor can bureaucratic expertise help to shape public policy. Thus a drone bureaucracy can neither administer well nor provide good policy advice to the rulers. Everything hinges on the efforts of the ruling party, and especially its leading cadres, under the principle of "democratic centralism," both to create public policies and to manage their implementation.

As a result, the collapse of single-party rule was never due to bureaucratic revolts through a coup d'etat. Rather, it was due to the administrative incompetence of drone bureaucrats and, above all, to the internal failures of a ruling party that could not successfully manage a total state apparatus and had begun to lose faith in the viability of their system. The resulting crashes, not coups, led to the typical problems faced by post-communist regimes [1997c].

No doubt, there are many other factors to consider, but I would guess that in any post-communist situation, the survival of a drone bureaucracy creates serious problems. The fusion of authority in parliamentary regime may facilitate the creation of a new and more effective mandarin-type bureaucracy to replace the old system drones. Moreover, the rise of competing and disciplined parliamentary parties may immunize the legislature from efforts by drone officials to obtain special favors. They may also be able to offer opportunities and inducements to new start-up enterprises established by energetic entrepreneurs who can imaginatively and independently, while also offering new job opportunities to workers who have not been paralyzed by the drone mentality.

By contrast, under presidentialist rule, post-communist regimes must experience much more difficulty making such a transition. Without fused power, it becomes more difficult to discharge or re-train the drones. Moreover, with the lack of incentives for disciplined parties that results from presidentialism, members of the legislature are vulnerable to all kinds of particularistic pressures. For example, when the managers of state enterprises are permitted to take control of them under the guise of privatization, they may well enrich themselves but be unable to operate them economically. There are enormous costs of transformation, such as downsizing the number of employees, creating a new management team dedicated to efficient performance, and making large capital investments. Typically, drone mangers of state enterprises are incapable of managing such a transformation, but their ingrained tendency, as drones, to exploit all opportunities to advantage themselves remains. They will look to the state -- especially the legislature -- for subventions to cover their predictable losses. The essential indiscipline of a presidentialist congress facilitates these efforts because individual members are likely to find many opportunities to advance their personal careers as legislators by colluding with the new "robber baron" managers of old state enterprises. A vicious circle arises when these barons, enriched by state subsidies, collude with corrupt legislators to perpetuate the support that perpetuates inefficient enterprises. It is hard to see how any presidentialist regime can overcome these difficulties. Any president seeking to reverse the trend will face strong opposition from the congress and find himself in a kind of "monkey trap." The only way to escape such a trap is to surrender power and permit a prime minister who is able to maintain parliamentary support to become the real head of government, not just the president's chief of staff.

Substantive (External) Problems

Up to this point, I have written about my earlier findings which relate to the internal structures and dynamics of presidentialist regimes compared with those of parliamentarism. More recently -- since 1996 -- it struck me that a different kind of assessment would be possible if we thought about the most important external or substantive problems confronting modern societies and compared the ability of the two constitutional regime types to cope with these problems. Three such problems struck me as worthy of attention: legitimacy, modernity, and ethnic conflict. No doubt there are many other problems that could be considered, but I cannot talk about all of them Here I shall limit myself to these three problem areas.

Legitimacy

Growing anti-government feelings in many countries, throughout the world, appear to fuel increasingly virulent militia and terrorist movements, and also neo-traditionalist efforts to restore the family and other non-governmental social structures. Both trends lead to apathy and alienation that undermines the effectiveness of public administration and reduces political support for governments. All of these reactions against governmental authority reflect a decline in legitimacy which I understand to mean the sense that government has a right to do what it does and that citizens have an obligation to support the government and obey its laws even when it is not in their immediate interest to do so.

Parliamentary regimes, I think, text [1998a] are more likely to be seen as legitimate by their citizens than are presidentialist regimes. To defend this opinion, I need to say something about the concept of sovereignty which undergirds all notions of legitimacy. Historically, under monarchic rule, sovereignty vested in the sovereign -- indeed, the word reflects this origin. However, with the rise of democratic movements, this notion was challenged by the slogan that sovereignty belongs to the people or the nation, but not to the king.

Of course, sovereignty also acquired other meanings, such as the notion that states have sovereign rights that protect them from intervention by other states, and rules of reciprocity were developed on the basis of self-interest -- each state's security hinged on its willingness to respect the rights of other states. Important as this concept is, I have no reason to use it here. Instead, I shall restrict my use of sovereignty to the criteria which legitimize the exercise of governmental authority.

The basis for monarchic sovereignty is typically supernatural -- there is some belief in a divine power that rules the world and expresses its intentions in the world. At one level, this idea manifests itself in revelations by prophets, priests and psychics. At a different, political level, a human being, through a ceremony like coronation, acquires the right to speak with divine authority. That is why kings "can do no wrong." They are above ordinary rules of justice deserve to be obeyed. Moreover, in traditional kingdoms, obedience to the sovereign was seen as a way to secure benefits -- health, wealth, and security would be granted to faithful subjects. The legitimacy of monarchic rule thus depends on widespread acceptance of the supernatural premises that inform royal sovereignty.

As secularism progressed -- especially in the West, on the shoulders of the vast changes of the Industrial Revolution, democratization and nationalism -- the sovereignty of kings came under attack. But what could take its place? There was widespread recognition of the need for governance and that to give legitimacy to any such regime, it had to be grounded in some principles that would assure public cooperation. The idea that gradually gained ground was that sovereignty did not belong to kings but, rather, it belonged to people. Everyone had rights, including the right to make decisions and govern themselves.

According to this idea, sovereignty rests not in kings or even in states but, rather, belongs to every individual. However, it was also apparent to the founders of every modern state that governance is a complex process in which having leaders and administrators is necessary. To provide guidelines for such a government, representative institutions, especially elected assemblies, play a central role. Sovereign individuals were viewed a having the authority to delegate powers to individuals empowered to act on their behalf. Sovereignty, in this sense, does not belong to a king, or a state, or even the assembly -- but rather, to the people whose representatives are empowered by delegation to make decisions in assemblies on behalf of sovereign citizens. From being subjects of a royal sovereign, citizens became the source of sovereignty. The representatives elected by citizens would then have the derivative authority to make day-to-day decisions about laws and public policies, but they should also have the right to shape and revise the basic rules which govern how such decisions are to be made -- in other words, the constitutive power to make fundamental laws.

In parliamentary systems this right is clearly centered in Parliament -- it has not only the legislative power, but is able to create and discharge the executive power in the form of a governing committee (cabinet) headed by a chief executive (prime minister). The executive is not an institution outside the parliament, but is a part of it. Moreover, in many parliamentary systems, Parliament has the right to adopt fundamental laws, often by a super vote such as a two-thirds majority, and perhaps in more than one session. However, the right of the sovereign people to self-government is clearly expressed in parliamentary systems by the powers granted by sovereign citizens to their parliament. This grant of sovereignty legitimizes the regime and, I believe, tends to generate popular support for governments based on this constitutional structure.

By contrast, under separation-of-powers principles, even though the sovereignty of the people is recognized, there is no unified center for its expression in representative government. Often, the elected president is viewed as the focus of delegated authority, which is why such systems are called presidentialist. However, the president cannot actually legitimize the regime. In the ceremonial role as head of state, s/he can no doubt, represent the state on formal occasions, but that does not truly legitimize the government. Perhaps in its origins, it was assumed that something like the sovereignty attributed to kings might be transferred to elected presidents, but without its supernatural sanctions, presidential authority is but a pale reflection of royal sovereignty.

Moreover, because presidents also must serve as the head of government, they all become vulnerable to attack, not only for their personal behavior (as in the impeachment process), but also for unpopular decisions. Since presidents have a fixed term, they can be faulted by any opposition majority in for purely partisan reasons. When a president is impeached, h/er ability to legitimize the government is even more deeply undermined.

The Congress also cannot legitimize the government in a presidentialist regime. Unlike a Parliament, Congress cannot discharge the chief executive by a no confidence vote -- structurally, we may say that is because the chief executive is not in the Congress but heads a separate branch outside of it. Moreover, every Congress lacks coordinated leadership and cannot formulate or enforce coherent policies -- rather, it adopts bits and pieces of legislation while depending on the President to integrate and implement them. Perhaps most importantly, the Congress cannot revise the Constitution and adopt changes that enable the regime to deal more coherently with the increasingly complex problems generated by modernity and globalization. Instead, at least in the U.S., amendments to the Constitution, although proposed by Congress, must await a long-term process of popular endorsement before they can be implemented. Without the ability to revise the Constitution, Congress remains subservient to the past rather than an active vehicle for popular sovereignty.

Some may view the Supreme Court as the chief center of legitimacy in a presidential systems insofar as it has the ability to assess the constitutionality of laws and presidential orders. However, because it has no right to revise the constitution, except indirectly and even surreptitiously, it can only be seen as the guardian of fundamental decisions made long ago. Moreover, because it can only render judgments on issues placed before the Court by litigants, it is denied any authority to initiate constitutional reforms. Without the ability to re-design the constitution by conscious and deliberate measures, the Supreme Court also lacks truly constitutive authority.

Thinking about the Court led me to conclude that the most substantial basis for legitimacy in the American state is the written Constitution as it was enacted in 1789, with subsequent amendments. Perhaps a Constitutional Convention could provide an authentic arena for the legitimization of governmental authority in the American system, but fears of what such an assembly might do have blocked the calling of any such Convention.

The historical reality is that changes of massive proportions have occurred during the past two centuries in the U.S. and throughout the world making fundamental changes in the Constitution necessary to enhance its legitimacy. Nevertheless, the mere fact that the Constitution remains with us to the present day makes it so sacrosanct that serious proposals to reform it can scarcely be considered. Instead, like divine write, it has become our most important legitimizing force. Antagonists on every side of almost all important issues in the U.S. pay lip service to the Constitution which, they claim, has often been violated but never stands in need of reform. Anyone proposing serious constitutional changes is virtually accused of treason or some worse crime. In fact, just as one cannot criticize the king in an absolute monarchy, so one must not question the Constitution in America. Exceptionally, Americans who take any public office are required to swear a solemn oath to defend the Constitution. I believe such oaths are scarcely every imposed on officials in parliamentary regimes.

The sanctity of the American Constitution contrasts with the low regard for their constitutions found in most other presidentialist regimes. In Latin America, at least a dozen countries have had more than twelve constitutions since the first one was promulgated -- they are quite willing to scrap and re-write their charters. In these countries, the inherent difficulties involved in trying to legitimize a separation-of-powers regime are, therefore, augmented by the lack of a venerable and respected Charter. To put it the other way around, one reason the American system works as well as it does is because it is the oldest -- the very age of its Constitution is an important factor explaining the relative success of this regime, but it has also become a major handicap in a world of rapid global change.

The Problems of Industrialization

Perhaps the most important aspects of modernity are those created by the Industrial Revolution. Without attempting to describe or explain this far-reaching transformation, let me only say here that it has presented a wide range of challenges to all modern governments. On the one hand they are asked to take measures to encourage "growth" or "development," which typically means, to industrialize. However, industrialization itself causes a host of problems such as conflicts between workers and owners of corporations, environmental pollution, risks to human health, and widening gaps between the rich and the poor. I tried to assess the constitutional implications of these changes in [1998 b] -- a still unpublished document available on my Home Page at: Industrialism

In order to cope with the problems created by industrialization, , governments need structures for public policy making that can be coordinated and implemented effectively. I believe that both coordination and implementation can be accomplished more easily in parliamentary than in presidentialist regimes. A standard response to this proposition is that the American experience invalidates it since, obviously, the U.S. has industrialized successfully, even if it has been as successful as most parliamentary regimes in handling its negative consequences. However, to evaluate the effects of presidentialism, one needs to consider all the cases, not just an outstanding exception. Virtually all presidentialist regimes except the U.S. have failed to industrialize, and all the industrialized democracies except the U.S. are parliamentary. Authentic conclusions need to take these facts into account.

There may be some other exceptions. For example, South Korea (still presidentialist in form) has achieved a high level of industrialization, despite its recent economic crisis. However, the giant steps in Korean industrialization occurred under a military dictatorship. There is no reason to assume that democratic government is a precondition for industrialization -- indeed, it seems clear enough that industrialization can occur in both single-party regimes and under military dictatorships. This proposition may be contested but I do not intend to debate it here because my concern is with democracies can deal with the problems of industrialization. Even if non-democracies can industrialize, that does not invalidate propositions about the inherent difficulties presidentialist democracies confront in the process of industrialization. My hypothesis does not focus on how to industrialize but, rather, on how to have a democracy in which industrialization can be managed. I suspect that both policy integration and execution can be managed more successfully in parliamentary regimes than in presidentialist -- this generalization cannot be disproved by pointing to exceptions, whether they be a presidentialist regime (like the U. S.) that has industrialized, or a parliamentary regime that has not.

As for integration, the fact that policies are formulated by a cabinet, with a lot of help from senior officials, means that their implications in related spheres of life can be considered carefully before they are presented to Parliament for further analysis and approval. No doubt there can be failures and one cannot assume that all cabinet-backed legislative proposals will be well coordinated with each other. Nevertheless, when one considers how policies are integrated in presidentialist regimes, one needs to take into account the autonomy of Congressional committees. As noted above, no Congress can fully consider in plenary session all the complicated pieces of legislation that it needs to enact. To handle this problem, the authority to make decisions has to be delegated to committees, subject to review by the whole body. In order to pare the plenary agenda down to a manageable size, most committee proposals must be approved by consensus. Although the work of each committee typically has implications for policies developed in other committees, there is not enough time or will to look carefully at these areas of overlap. The result, as noted by many students of American government, is a great proliferation of uncoordinated policies that often clash with each other.

When one looks at the bureaucracy in order to see how public policies are implemented, one discovers another great difference between parliamentary and presidentialist regimes. In the former, retainer systems have been largely replaced by different kinds of mandarin systems. No doubt there are many differences among them, but two important properties tend to prevail: tenure and rotation. Long-term experience combined with personal security tend to produce competence that enables officials to administer complex policies effectively. Rotation between different agencies and levels also gives mandarins a sense of how interactive policies affect each other and helps them integrate policies.

For reasons explained above, I do not think any presidentialist regime can maintain control over a mandarin bureaucracy. However, I do think such regimes could retain control over an American-style hybrid bureaucracy which, I believe also explains the U.S. exception, though at a high cost. This kind of hybrid system can develop professionalized bureaucrats in many fields of specialization, but it difficult, as in the U.S., to achieve effective integration among them.

However, most presidentialist regimes still have retainer bureaucracies that are unable to develop the professional competence needed to cope effectively with the complex problems generated by industrialization. Although they could maintain control over an American-style hybrid bureaucracy if they could install one, they are unlikely to make such a reform because of the resistance that organized retainers are able to offer. There may be a few countries in which hybrid bureaucracies can be established -- I can think of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and the Philippines as possible examples -- but they will be exceptional cases.

In 20^th century presidentialist regimes, where mandarin bureaucracies existed before they were created, it may be possible to find ways to manage them, probably by means of adaptations in the presidentialist system. South Korea might be an example if it can effectively use the institution of a "prime minister" which it already has to move toward parliamentarism. A different problem exists for post-communist regimes that have embraced presidentialism. In these countries, entrenched drone bureaucracies may be expected to resist reforms that jeopardize their established privileges. I think it will be a very hard transition to achieve, but perhaps, with a lot of help, it may be possible for them to adopt an American-type hybrid bureaucracy -- they would surely be swamped if they tried to develop a genuine mandarinate.

Ethnic Nationalism.

The achievement of legitimacy in any modern state is complicated by the growing problems of ethnic nationalism. I distinguish this problem from that produced by ethnic diversity. In principle, I think, both presidentialist and parliamentary regimes can be responsive to the needs of minorities whose members see themselves as citizens of the state. However, it may be easier for parliamentary regimes in which proportional representation is a safe option to accommodate ethnic minorities by permitting them to create ethnic parties, though there are risks involved in this strategy. Even in a polity with single-member districts and a two-party system, however, it may be possible for each party to open its doors to minorities and take care of their needs within the system. At best, though, I think this is a difficult task to accomplish.

A more difficult problem arises when members of an ethnic community reject citizenship in the states where they happen to be living and insist that they have the right to create, or re-establish, a state of their own. I have argued that it may be easier for parliamentary states to grant them enough autonomy to satisfy their demands without giving them the complete independence expected with separate statehood. If some members of an ethnic nation find that through PR they can achieve many of their goals, this might ameliorate demands for political autonomy or independence. However, I am not sure of that and it may be that the problems created by ethnic nationalism are equally difficult for both types of constitutional system. I shall not say anything more about this question here because I discuss it at some length in Chapter 5. See [1998b] or Nationalism

CONCLUSION

To conclude this chapter, let me return to the subject of the American constitutional system which, although based on the separation-of-powers principle has, exceptionally, been able to survive without a collapse for more than two centuries. However, this remarkable achievement by no means guarantees the indefinite survival of this regime in the future. Every year and every new president brings new challenges that will continuously test the ability of American democracy to cope with new crises -- perhaps the day will come when it, too, will succumb.

The current impeachment crisis provides a significant test. Bill Clinton is the first elected president in American history to be tried in the Senate. If Clinton had abused his powers in the way I think the Founders feared when they wrote the impeachment clause into the Constitution, we could see this device as an authentic safeguard against tyranny. As now employed, however, the threat of impeachment has become a weapon in the struggle between an ardent opposition majority and a stubborn minority president. It might well lead to the downfall, after two centuries, of the precarious constitutional system that Philip Cerny has referred to as Madisonian entropy. However, I am optimistic enough to think that if the current crisis provokes serious re-consideration of the American constitutional system, it may be possible to devise means, even short of formal Amendments, that would make the system more viable and help safeguard democratic governance in America.

In the first draft of this chapter, I appended a discussion of this problem as a concluding word of caution. However, I decided later to post these remarks on my Web Page as a separate essay, and readers may find it at: Future of Impeachment text. It contains a kind of speculation about the future and complements an earlier piece that is more historically retrospective, called The Anachronism of Impeachment. It can also be found on my Home Page at: text. Since this brings the autobiographical account of my thinking about presidentialism and parliamentarism down to the present day, let me sign off here and go on to the final Chapter, #7.

BIBLIOGRAPHY (To be added)

Links to Home Pages containing information relevant to Viable Constitutionalism can be found at Sites

CHECK-LIST: Works by the author

2000. Ethnic Diversity, Nationalism, and Constitutional Democracy A Working Paper for UNESCO/MOST

1999a. The Future of Impeachment: Nixon, Clinton and What Next?

1999b. The Anachronism of Impeachment"

1998a. "Presidentialism vs. Parliamentarism: Implications for Representativeness and Legitimacy," International Political Science Review. 18:3, pp.253-278. See the original unabridged draft

1998b. "Presidentialism vs. Parliamentarism" Draft of Implications for Industrialization and for Ethnonational Conflict. UNESCO paper, first draft.

1998a "Public Administration in America: Why our Uniqueness is Exceptional and Important." Public Administration Review, 58:1, pp.22-31. See the abstract and the unabridged draft.
1997a. "Bureaucracy and Viable Constitutionalism." Abdo Baaklini and Helen Desfosses, eds, Designs for Democratic Stability: Studies in Viable Constitutionalism. Armonk, NY; London, UK: M.E.Sharpe. pp.95-125.

1997b. Democratic Political Models and Transformations: The Costs of Presidentialism. Prepared for use in the Magisterium Encyclopedia, Moscow, Russia.

1997c. "Coups and Crashes." Ali Farazmand, ed. Modern Systems of Government: Exploring the Role of Bureaucrats and Politicians. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. pp. 8-47.

1997d. Constitutional Choices: the Modern Dilemma Prepared for use at the workshop on institutional choice in Taipei, August 13, 1997.

1996 "Viable Constitutionalism and Bureaucracy: Theoretical Premises." Journal of Behavioral and Social Sciences. Tokyo: Tokai University, Research Institute of Social Sciences, Vol 1995:2, pp.1-35. A lecture presented at the Tokai University in Tokyo, (March 1995) based on a presentation at the conference on "Viable Constitutionalism" held at Tokai University in Honolulu, with co-sponsorship by COVICO, November 1994.

1995 "Presidentialism: A Problematic Constitutional System." Conquering Politico-Administrative Frontiers. A festschrift honoring Raul de Guzman, Ledivina V. Carino, ed. Quezon City, Phil: University of the Philippines Press. pp. 541-562. Revised version of a lecture presented in honor of Jose Abueva at the College of Public Administration, University of the Philippines, Jan. 1994

1994a. "Conceptual Homogenization of a Heterogeneous Field: Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective." Comparing Nations: Concepts, Strategies, Substance. Mattei Dogan and Ali Kazancigil, eds. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. pp.72-152. A revised version of "Presidentialism in the U.S.: A Comparativist Perspective," a paper prepared for the conference on "Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy: Does it Make a Difference," held at Georgetown University, May 1989. A revised draft was distributed under the title, "Presidentialism: An Empirical Theory." .

1994b. "Bureaucracy and Constitutional Reform." The Korean Public Administration Journal. Vol.2:4, pp.187-222. This is a revised version of a paper prepared for presentation at a seminar of the Nicaraguan Congress, Dec. 1992. It was also used at the COVICO conference in Albany, NY, March 1994, and after further revisions, was utilized in a book based on papers given at that conference -- see 1997a.

1994c. "Why has Bureaucracy not Smothered Democracy in America?" Comparative Public Management.. Randall Baker, ed. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. pp.37-52.

1994d. "Bureaucracy: A Profound Perplexity for Presidentialism." Ali Farazmand, ed. Handbook on Bureaucracy. New York: Marcel Dekker. pp.97-148.

1993a. "Fragility of the Third World's Regimes." International Social Science Journal. No. 136 (May 1993) pp. 199-243. Revised version of "Bureaucratic Power in the Third World," based on draft prepared for the Conference on Comparative Research on National Political Systems, Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin, 9-12 July, 1984. A preliminary version was published in 1984 as "Bureaucratic Power and Administrative Change")

1993b. "Bureau Power: Some Paradoxes for Northeast Asia." The Korean Public Administration Journal. vol.1:4, pp.50-68. Seoul, Korea: Korean Institute for Public Administration. Paper presented at the International seminar, October 1992.

1993c. "Bureau Power in Southeast Asia." Asian Journal of Political Science. Singapore: National University of Singapore. Vol.1:1, pp.3-28.

1988. "The Survival of Presidentialism in America: Para-Constitutional Practices." International Political Science Review. 9:4. pp. 247-278. Excerpts from this article were re-published in 1993 as "Presidentialism: A Problematic Regime Type." Parliamentary vs. Presidential Government, Arend Lijphart, ed. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Chapter 32, pp.217-222.

1984. "Bureaucratic Power and Administrative Change" preliminary version -- see 1993a

1975a. Legislative Origins: A Comparative and Contextual Approach. Pittsburgh, PA: International Studies Association, Occasional Paper no.7. 79 pages.

1975b. "Organizational Structures and Contexts." Administration and Society. 7:2 (Aug.). pp. 150-190. Revision of a paper, "The Organizational Contexts of Organizations," prepared for a CAG conference on Comparative Organization Theory.

1974 . "Legislative Structures: Some Thoughts on Elected National Assemblies." in Allan Kornberg, ed. Legislatures in Comparative Perspective. New York: McKay. Based on a paper presented at a conference on legislatures, Duke University, Feb. 1970.

1971 Administrative Reform and Political Responsiveness: A Theory of Dynamic Balancing. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE. Professional Paper in Comparative Politics. 39 pages. Based on a paper, "Administrative Reform as a Problem of Dynamic Balancing," presented at the Round Table on Administrative Reform and Development, Beirut, Lebanon, April 1970. The original text was published in the proceedings of the Round Table on Administrative Reform and Development Beirut, Lebanon: National Institute of Administration and Development. Also published with the same title in Philippine Journal of Public Administration, (April "1970"). pp. 101-135; and in Portuguese translation in Revista do Administracao Publica. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Vargas Foundation. 4(1970). pp. 75-114.

1970a. "The Comparison of Whole Political Systems." Robert Holt and John Turner, eds. The Methodology of Comparative Research. New York: Free Press.. Translated as "Une Typologie Exhaustive des Systemes Politiques," in Mattei Dogan and D. Pelassy, eds. LaComparaison Internationale en Sociologie Politique. Paris: Libraries Techniques, 1980. pp. 143-154.

1970b. With Lloyd Musolf, "Comparative Legislative Studies and Services," Legislatures in Developmental Perspective. Allan Kornberg and Lloyd Musolf , eds. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Pp.501 - 520. A symposium based on papers presented at the CAG-sponsored conference in Planting Fields, New York, 8-10 December 1967..

1969 "The Structures of Government and Administrative Reform," Ralph Braibanti and Associates, eds. Political and Administrative Development. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. pp. 220-324.

1967a "Comparative Politics and the Study of Political Parties: A Structural Approach." William J. Crotty, ed. Approaches to the Study of Party Organization. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. pp. 45-104.Italian translation, "Criteri di classificazione dei partiti," Domenico Tisichella, ed. Partitie Gruppi di Pressione. Bologna, Italy: Societa editrice il Mulino, 1972.
1967b.. "The Theory of Political Development," James C. Charlesworth, ed. Contemporary Political Analysis. New York: Free Press, 1967. pp. 317-349.

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