On the separation of executive and legislative powers: Executive independence, liberty, and social welfare

Justin Fox and Mattias K Polborn

Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2021, vol. 33, issue 4, 430-454

Abstract: We explore the effects of a particular facet of separation of powers—namely, the executive’s independence from the legislature—on maintaining a norm of legislative restraint in which antagonistic factions refrain from passing laws that infringe on their rival’s liberties. Our main result establishes that executive independence may sometimes undermine and at other times facilitate legislative restraint, depending on the probabilities with which the factions hold legislative and executive power. Our results contribute to the larger game-theoretic literature exploring the effects of political institutions; our results also contribute to the literature exploring how institutions designed to protect liberty affect tacit cooperation among rival factions.

Keywords: Separation of powers; enforcement; tacit cooperation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09516298211043234 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jothpo:v:33:y:2021:i:4:p:430-454

DOI: 10.1177/09516298211043234

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Theoretical Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().