Given that institutional rules and procedures have a large impact on both the politics
of policy making and the implementation of various policy designs, what lessons can
we learn from the institutionalist perspective for policy design? Research on the exact
impact of institutional procedures on policy decision making and the interaction
effects of institutional rules with political, social, and even historical contexts is still
in its infancy. What has been learned so far?
One approach has consisted of typologies for comparing political systems.
Lij-phart (1984, 1999) divides democracies into two types: majoritarian and consensus
democracies.
The political institutions of majoritarian systems provide for the creation of strong majorities and provide few constraints on government actions, whereas consensus democracies focus on including minorities and providing those minorities with institutional mechanisms for blocking majority decisions. He determines whether the political system of a given nation belongs to the first or second type by considering a number of variables that he groups into two dimensions, the ‘‘executive-party’’ dimension and the ‘‘federalism-unitary’’ dimension.
The executive-party dimension is measured by indicators such as the frequency with which one
governing coalition is in power, the number of political parties and the types of divisions or ‘cleavages’ that characterize them (socioeconomic, religion, language, ethnicity), the average duration of governments, and the disproportionality of the electoral system.
The more these indicators show a pattern of concentrated government power, the more ‘‘majoritarian’’ the ranking of the political system on the executive-party dimension.
The federal-unitary dimension is characterized by bicameralism, tax decentralization, and constitutional rigidity, all of which Lij-phart uses to indicate federalism.
He finds a statistical association between consensus