Acceso usuarios
Sergio Dellavalle
In their quarrel against the advocates of the presidential system, supporters of the parliamentary counterpart often look at the German institutional construction as the example of how parliamentarianism can avoid the concentration of political power in the hands of the executive without falling into instability. The same preference characterizes also the partisans of the proportional voting system against the defenders of the first-past-the-post plurality voting procedure. A more impassionate analysis of the German institutional set-up and voting system reveals, however, that the preference might be ill-oriented. Regardless of the many excellent features of the German constitutional and electoral organization, some significant questions can be raised on whether it really guarantees, simultaneously and at the same level, sufficient decisionmaking capacity to the government, a high quality of parliamentary representation of the manifold political preferences of the citizens, and a non-aleatory respect of the will of the people as it has been expressed at the polls. Moreover, Germany displays a further shortcoming of all parliamentary systems, with no convincing answer, namely the fact that control to prevent abuses of power by the executive is not guaranteed anymore by a Parliament strongly linked to the government by the confidence relationship, but instead by the Constitutional Court or by infra-state federal institutions. As a result, a case for parliamentarianism that relies primarily on the German model does not seem to be able to banish convincingly the doubts affecting the parliamentary option, nor to overrule the arguments in favour of the presidential checks-andbalances- system as well as of the first-past-the-post plurality voting method.
