It is often said that the United States has an exceptional democracy. This can mean any number of things, but we are concerned with the question of whether the structure of American democratic institutions is similar or dissimilar to other democratic states. If it is different, in what ways is American democracy different—and do those differences matter? What explanations exist for these differences? These are the themes that animate this book.
Specifically, our book examines the choices made by the designers of American government at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 and the institutional structures that evolved from those choices, and compares them to thirty other democracies. The basic topics for comparison are as follows: constitutions, federalism, elections, political parties, interest groups, legislative power, executive power, judicial power, and public policy.
Each chapter starts with a discussion of the feasible option set available on each type of institutional choice and the choices actually made by the US founders as a means of introducing the concepts, and then it discusses how specific choices made in the United States led to particular outcomes. We look at the discussions on these topics in The Federalist Papers and the debates in the Philadelphia Convention. This approach gives us a means of explaining the concepts in a comparative fashion (for instance, federal versus unitary government, unicameralism versus bicameralism, and so on) before moving into the comparisons of the American system with our other thirty democracies, which make up the second half of each chapter. Each chapter contains an explicit list of specific differences between the US and the other democracies as well as comparative data in tabular and graphical formats. All of the figures and tables contain comprehensive comparative data featuring all thirty-one cases (save in a handful of instances) or specific thematic subsets of the thirty-one cases (for instance, presidential systems or bicameral legislatures).
Our book can serve two important functions: as a textbook and as a scholarly contribution. First, as a textbook it can work in a variety of courses and course levels, depending on the aspects of the text a given instructor wishes to emphasize. On one hand, the text takes a fairly straightforward look at basic topics in government and mirrors the topics that might be used at the introductory level. On the other hand, the book demonstrates both rigorous comparisons and raises a number of theoretical issues linked to institutional design. It can therefore be used at multiple levels depending on the nature of the course and the focus of a given instructor:
1. The basic themes of the book, and the structure of the chapters, were chosen to correspond to the themes typically found in introductory American government textbooks. Our goal was to make it possible for the comparative-minded professor to use the book to augment a basic American government textbook. While some of the more-advanced themes might be downplayed in such a course, the book can very easily be used as a supplement for American government texts.
2. Our book can also be used as a book in undergraduate comparative politics courses. It can serve as an anchor text on a syllabus in such courses focused on democracy and institutional design, but also as a secondary text alongside more-general textbooks.
3. It can also be used at the graduate level, insofar as it provides a comprehensive comparative study of the thirty-one cases and makes a number of theoretical claims that can be delved into further at this level.
Our book also makes a scholarly contribution by means of its analysis of the variations of democracy between the United States and the rest of the world. There is a void in the literature in that few works explicitly treat the United States as one case among many. Rather, political science tends to be segmented into fields of American politics and comparative politics, with the latter often meaning, in practice, any country or countries other than the United States. We believe that this is detrimental to both the study of the United States and to comparative political inquiry. Our book seeks to stimulate placing the United States into a broader comparative perspective. At the moment the segregation of the United States from the rest of the world within political science—in faculty hiring, teaching from undergraduate to graduate levels, in many professional journals, conference programs, and university press catalogs—tends to give the impression that comparative institutional analysis is relevant only in foreign lands. There is a need to understand that the United States is not exceptional in the sense that we are just as bound by institutional constraints and pathways as is any other population. We think this can best be done by comparing US practices to those of other, relatively large, established democracies.
The origins of this book can be directly traced to two seminars taught jointly by Bernard Grofman and Arend Lijphart in the winter quarters of 1996 and 1999 to combined groups of graduate students at the University of California campuses in Irvine and San Diego. In four of the ten weeks the students from one campus attended the seminar at the other campus, alternating between campuses. The other six weeks the course was taught via teleconferencing, using the University of California network and facilities at each of the campuses. The seminars used draft versions of Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy as their template for how to situate the United States in comparative perspective. Grofman and Lijphart had met and become friends in 1977 and coedited three books, on electoral systems and reapportionment issues, in the 1980s.
In 2000 they agreed to turn their seminar on “The United States in Comparative Perspective” into a book. After Lijphart’s retirement from teaching at UC San Diego, Grofman taught the seminar twice on his own as a required course for graduate students affiliated with UC Irvine’s Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD), but progress on turning the seminar into a book was slow as a result of a multitude of competing commitments in the early 2000s, such as the completion of a fourth coedited book, on electoral and party systems in the Nordic countries. While both authors remained strongly committed to the project, it became clear to them that only with the collaboration of another scholar or scholars would the book ever get written. They invited Matthew S. Shugart in 2003 to join the project as a third coauthor. Progress picked up and draft chapters were written by Lijphart and Shugart in the mid-2000s. In the spring quarter of 2007, Shugart cotaught a course with his PhD candidate Royce Carroll at UC San Diego, building the course primarily around the draft chapters that then existed and drafting some new chapters. In addition, Shugart developed some of the themes that would later evolve into the theoretical framework of this book—especially the grounding of the comparative analysis in the writings of Madison—in his Policy-Making Processes, a course he taught for many years for the Masters of Pacific International Affairs program at UC San Diego.
Still, the now-three coauthors agreed that further energy needed to be injected, and in the late 2000s they invited Steven L. Taylor to become the book’s fourth coauthor. Taylor and Shugart first became acquainted at UC Irvine when Taylor was an undergraduate and Shugart a PhD student, and Taylor took Shugart’s Regime Change course in 1988. Taylor’s subsequent work in his own PhD studies at the University of Texas at Austin and as a professor at Troy University focused on democratic institutional change in Colombia. After 2005, Shugart and Taylor began honing some of the ideas that they would later incorporate into revised drafts of this book on their respective Weblogs, Taylor’s PoliBlog and Shugart’s Fruits & Votes.1 Also continuing the tradition of teaching courses based on the draft text, Taylor workshopped some of the early drafts of the text as part of his comparative government course, and later used an early manuscript of the book as part of an advanced undergraduate seminar, The US Constitution in Comparative Perspective.
The book in its present incarnation is far more comprehensive and cohesive than the course materials of long ago and far better suited to complement a standard American government textbook. However, although it has taken more than a decade to bring the project to fruition, one aspect of the project has never changed, namely the view that the United States can best be understood by seeing it in comparative perspective—as one democracy among many. The founder of CSD, Russell Dalton, opens his course in comparative politics by quoting Rudyard Kipling’s aphorism: “What knows he of England who only England knows?” With the United States substituting for England, that quote defines the spirit of the original Grofman-Lijphart course and of this book.
We should like to acknowledge the financial support received from several sources. Grofman and Lijphart are grateful to the Inter-campus Academic Program Initiative Fund, University of California Office of the President, for its support for travel costs and for the use of teleconferencing facilities that made their joint graduate seminars in 1996 and 1999 possible. Grofman would like to acknowledge the longtime support for his involvement in this project by the UC Irvine Center for the Study of Democracy and by the Jack W. Peltason (Bren Foundation) Chair. Shugart is likewise grateful to the CSD for providing funding to defray his research expenses related to this project. Taylor would like to thank the Troy University Faculty Development Committee for granting sabbatical time that was used to jumpstart this project.
In addition, we would like to acknowledge the invaluable contributions by several individuals. In particular, Grofman thanks Clover Behrend-Gethard for her secretarial assistance in the early days of the project. Shugart thanks the various senior colleagues and coteachers who nurtured him in his earliest years at UC San Diego’s School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, especially Peter Cowhey, Peter Gourevitch, Mathew McCubbins, and Susan Shirk. All four of us also want to express our deep gratitude to our research assistants: Royce Carroll, Mark Gray, Stephen J. K. Lee, Jeff Daniel, and Mónica Pachón. Additionally, we owe a debt of gratitude to numerous experts who graciously answered our questions concerning a wide range of topics that helped enhance this book: David Fisk, Stephen Gardbaum, Mark P. Jones, Youngmi Kim, Joy Langston, Keith Poole, Kuniaki Nemoto, Peter M. Siavelis, Melody Ellis Valdini, and Gregory Weeks.
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1. http://fruitsandvotes.wordpress.com and http://poliblogger.com. In recent years Taylor has also been a regular contributor to Outside the Beltway (http://outsidethebeltway.com).