Saturday, March 11, 2017

Different versions of democracy

Some political systems handle populism better than others
"One leading taxonomy of political systems is that of Dutch-born political scientist Arend Lijphart, an emeritus professor at the University of California at San Diego. In his classic book “Patterns of Democracy,” Lijphart divides the world’s democracies between consensus systems and majoritarian systems. Consensus democracies tend to have proportional voting, lots of parties and coalition governments. Majoritarian democracies feature two big parties that alternate stints in power........Lijphart finds that, in general, consensus systems deliver better economic results and more voter trust than majoritarian ones."

No comments: