Executive

In the classical political thought of John Locke or Charles de Secondat (Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu), a sharp distinction was drawn between a polity's executive and its legislature. According to theories of democracy that advocate a strict separation of powers, a legislature should formulate, debate, amend, and adopt laws, whereupon an executive should then implement them. In practice, executives throughout the world have developed much greater power by becoming governments that contain a political dimension (heads of government and ministers) as well as an administrative one (civil services). However, the power of executives has recently been questioned and even decreased in countries where governance now genuinely describes the nature and extent of public authority.

Historically, and within each form of democracy, executives quickly developed more autonomy to make decisions than initially expected. Through taking the form of governments, they gained in authority by developing a legitimacy to make decisions when implementing laws adopted by the legislature. More fundamentally still, executives became more powerful because they soon developed the capacity to propose draft legislation to the legislature and marshal parliamentary majorities to ensure much of it would pass into the statute books. In the late nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth century, this process accelerated alongside and because of the emergence and consolidation of interventionist welfare states. As increasing numbers of laws and secondary legislation were required to run the public policies set up to fulfill interventionist and welfarist goals, in most countries the executive was granted more autonomy to make decisions with less and less reference to its respective legislature. Indeed, by the 1960s, the power of parliaments in certain polities had receded to such an extent that commentators spoke of “cabinet government” in the United Kingdom, “presidential government” in the United States, and “administrative government” in France.

Since the crisis of governability experienced by many Western states in the 1970s, the power of executives is being more systematically reviewed and criticized. So far, little evidence shows that legislatures have regained ground against them. However, five series of trends brought together in the narrative of governance strongly suggest that during the last twenty years, executive power has generally been on the wane.