Representative democracy and the populist temptation

pp. 111-130

in: , Klaus von Beyme, Berlin, Springer, 2014

Abstract

My topic sounds rather conventional in terms of a traditional institutional approach. But the "enlightened neo-institutionalists' of our days came back to the old controversies of the late 1940s when in the United States a debate was waged whether one should introduce a parliamentary system in the USA. After 1945 even the American Political Science Association—normally refraining from ex-cathedra-normative statements—made contributions about a "Toward a more responsible Two-Party System" (1950) in order to push the presidential system into another form of representative government, as an American functional equivalent of a British cabinet government.