Comparing Democracy

Comparing democracies There are four major factors that contributed to the new interest in comparing democracies that is the comparison of regimes, the ‘third wave’ of democratization, institutional engineering, and the last one is Neo-institutionalism. The first factor comes from the study of Powell (1982) and Lijphart (1984) that has characterize and compare democratic regimes as a whole. Lijphart has elaborated the distinction of the majoritarian and the consensus models of democracy to prove the highly influential contribution to the literature on comparative democracy. In Majoritarian and consensus model of democracy, the institutional features that is executive, executive-legislative relations, party system, interest group system, type of government, legislature, constitution, judicial review, and central bank are opposite with one another. Second factor comes from the growing weight of the ‘third wave’ of democratization from the explosion in transition to democracy. Samuel Huntington (1991) argues that democratization has developed in the way of ‘waves’. The wave means that the changes from democratic to non-democratic regimes. Institutional engineering is the third factor; this was also related to the latter stages of the ‘third wave’. The constitutional engineers have become interested in the evaluation of the different model of democracy in term of effectiveness, stability, and legitimacy. They are more interested in why some system is better than the other. For example are the debates between the advocates of presidential and parliamentary models. The last factor that is the neo-institutionalism, this is the new institutional turn in the political analysis. In neo-institutional approach scholars begin to inquire systematically into the effects of democracy rather than the source of democracy. Democracy is beginning to be seen as a system that rich in variation and potential capacities and could impact differently on performance through its