Checking Executive Personalism: Collegial Governments and the Level of Democracy*

Abstract

The world is facing a tide of "cult-of-personality" governments that threaten liberal democracy (e.g., Trump, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Orbán). Collegial executives are a long-established institutional alternative, predicated upon disarming this very shortcoming in the practice of democracy. These are regimes in which multiple people share power, limiting executive excess. Historiographic accounts regard the collegial executive as inimical to resolute decision-making and responsible for democratic deterioration. Despite being used since antiquity, there is no empirical research on how collegial executives influence democracy. This paper tests, for the first time, whether collegial executives are substantially worse for democracy than single-leader executives. The focus is on the only robust polyarchy to have alternated twice between single-person and collegial-executive governments: Uruguay. Using the Synthetic Control Method, the paper creates a fictional Uruguay to compare with the country's real experience. The results show that multipleexecutive governments have had no impact on Uruguay's level of democracy.

Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism

“…As I discuss in Chapter 9, however, these mechanisms are problematic counterweights or tend to weaken the potential benefits of the separation of powers. A much rarer approach-used in Uruguay from 1952 to 1967-is to directly elect a multi-person, collegial executive whose members share power equally and make decisions collectively (Altman 2008(Altman , 2020; see also Orentlicher 2013). Its downsides include a potential lack of efficiency and resoluteness (Altman 2020: 322-323).…”

“…The term "concordance" is often understood as a synonym for the so-called Magic Formula in Switzerland: the convention that the four largest parties ought to be represented in the Federal Council, with three parties having two members and one party one member.11 This convention is typically seen as an ⁹ This collective control also limits personalism under pure presidentialism, as was the case in Uruguay from 1952 to 1967 (Altman 2020).…”