Juan Linz, How Democracies Die, and Parliamentarism

Parliament of Laos

Levitsky and Ziblatt's 2018 book, "How Democracies Die" was an immediate sensation in policy circles. It was praised by The New York Times, Paul Krugman, Daron Acemoglu, Jonathan Chait and several others. The great idea behind the book is that we have not been paying attention to the importance of unwritten norms. The Wall Street Journal summarizes it as such: " democracies aren’t destroyed because of the impulses of a single man; they are, instead, degraded in the course of a partisan tit-for-tat dynamic that degrades norms over time until one side sees an opening to deliver the death blow." According to this view, more important than the underlying constitution a country has are the norms that policymakers follow because some things are just not done. Self-restraint is key for the survival of democracy. If players always try to take advantage - or "play constitutional hardball" as the authors put it - democracy is in peril.

Constitutions themselves take a backseat. Levitt and Ziblatt write: "are constitutional safeguards, by themselves, enough to secure a democracy? We believe the answer is no. Even well-designed constitutions sometimes fail. Germany's 1919 Weimar constitution was designed by some of the country's greatest legal minds (...) Or consider the experience of postcolonial Latin America. Many of the region's newly independent republics modeled themselves directly on the United States, adopting U.S.-style presidentialism (...)"

For Levitsky and Ziblatt, the behavior of politicians is the main cause of authoritarianism. If politicians have authoritarian tendencies, the country will become authoritarian. If they are truly democratic, the country will consolidate its democracy. They affiliate that line of thinking to Juan Linz: "So how do we identify authoritarianism in politicians who don't have an obvious antidemocratic record? Here we turn to the eminent political scientist Juan Linz." But as readers of Why Not Parliamentarism? will know, Linz is the single greatest reference for political scientists who believe that constitutions have a prominent role for the chances of breakdown. Now the text they rely on the most is the 1978 book "The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes" My library does not have a copy of it and, if you clicked the link, you will have seen that it costs almost a thousand dollars to buy, so I will only have to guess. I believe what happened was that Linz's thought evolved from the time he published the book till when he first published "The Perils of Presidentialism" (1990) and "The Failure of Presidential Democracy" (1994). The sensation is of reading a book on the romantic chemistry between Luke and Leia, by someone who has only watched "Star Wars: a New Hope". You have to watch the other movies!

To be sure, the authors do cite "The Perils of Presidentialism", but only to say that norms are even more important in a presidential democracy because of their proneness to deadlock. And they give the impression that Linz worried about an "unrestrained Congress [which] can block the president's every move, threaten to throw the country into chaos by refusing to fund the government, or vote to remove the president on dubious grounds." I do not see any evidence that he worried about an unrestrained Congress; quite the contrary.

Norms won't save us

The advantage of clear constitutional rules versus unwritten norms is that the first, in Brennan and Hamlins's terms, "economize on virtue". This means that they make it much easier to be virtuous, whatever propensity for virtue any given actor has. In popular terms, this has been expressed in the proverb "Good fences make good neighbors". If we cannot trust people to follow clear, written, rules, how are we to expect that they would follow vague, unwritten ones?

The good news is that we can expect people to follow constitutions - if they are clear enough. All of the supposedly "well-designed constitutions" which Levitt and Ziblatt argue failed despite their good design were not well-designed at all. Weimar Germany's failure is directly related to the emergency powers its constitution conferred to the president. While Levitsky and Ziblatt call the president of Germany in that time a "figurehead", the constitution disagreed. Likewise, the Latin American constitutions did not emulate the precedence which the American Congress has over the other powers (in Morris and Munger's terms, Congress is the "root branch"). As I discuss in my book, nothing of the sort can be said of Latin American congresses, where presidents were the equivalent of elected kings.