Counterpoint to Ogilvie and Carus - Poland
This is the third blog post responding to Ogilvie and Carus's chapter in History of Economic Growth . To recapitulate, Ogilvie and Carus argue that strong parliaments do not always bring about development. As I said in the first post, that would be too demanding a request from someone who was proposing that parliamentarism is better than presidentialism - and, to be fair, Ogilvie and Carus never make such a claim, I am just anticipating criticism. Still, the examples they provide seem rather to reinforce the benefits of parliamentarism than cast doubt on them. I have talked about Wurttemberg and the Netherlands. I have tried to show that those experiences were remarkably successful for their time. In this post, I will discuss the case of Poland. I will not argue that it was a success, I do not have elements to believe it was. What I will argue is that Ogilvie and Carus's description of an extraordinarily strong Parliament ("a territory well known for the strength of its parliament (the Sejm), which was so strong that no ruler of Poland was able to promulgate any legislation or implement any policy without parliamentary consent [Czapliński (1985); Mączak (1997); Czaja (2009)].") I do not dispute that it has been described as a territory with a strong parliament, and that any legislation or policy needed to have parliamentary consent. It may well have been a relatively strong parliament for the time, but one aspect would make it much weaker than current parliaments - the necessity of consensus among the members.
As Froomkin and Shapiro put it, "the American system institutionalizes veto players to a greater degree than any other democracy—save only the 'unit veto' that prevailed in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the mid sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, where any member of the Sejm could nullify all legislation passed in the current session by yelling 'Nie pozwalam!' (literally: 'I do not allow!')."
When a body needs to achieve supermajorities, of which consensus is the extreme example, that body is not strengthened*. Of all the possible decisions that such body can take, the only ones which will be approved are those that are not only better for everyone involved (an extremely limiting restriction; the vast majority of changes will make someone at least marginally worse off, and ensuring that such person is compensated maybe impossible) but also perceived to be better by everyone involved - which is possibly even more limiting, because people disagree just about everything. Two things happen when the capacity for decision-making of such bodies is undermined by supermajority requirements: 1) the executive, as agenda-setter, becomes much more powerful because it is free to interpret the vague orders coming from the consensus-based body in whatever form suits them better; and 2) the decision-making process is concentrated at the lower levels which are not limited by such rules.
The argument that Poland was less parliamentary because it did not have majority rule may sound as a "no true scotsman" fallacy. However, the recognition of the centrality of majority rule for proper functioning of parliaments is ancient. Most recently, Huey Li has a great book on how majority rule works better than other systems. But the argument has been made by figures such as Thomas Jefferson ("The first principle of republicanism is that the lex majoris partis is the fundamental law of every society of individuals of equal rights; to consider the will of the society enounced by the majority of a single vote as sacred as if unanimous is the first of all lessons in importance, yet the last which is thoroughly learnt. This law once disregarded, no other remains but that of force, which ends necessarily in military despotism.") and Abraham Lincoln ("Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.") As Döring puts it "for most political scientists, the principle of majority rule is tantamount to the principle of democracy". I happen to agree with these arguments, but even if you disagree, I believe it is fair to argue that, by adopting a strong consensus requirement, the Polish Sejm greatly deviated from what we normally view as a strong parliament.