Wednesday, August 15, 2007

International conference discusses choice of constitutional systems

Taipei, Aug. 13 (CNA) A two-day international conference hosted by the Taiwan Thinktank opened Monday to discuss a theme titled "After the Third Wave -- Problems And Challenges for New Democracies, " with more than 40 scholars from Argentina, Canada, Ireland, South Korea, Italy, Australia, the U.K., the U.S. and Taiwan participating.

A study by Robert Elgie, a professor at Dublin City University, shows that the semi-presidential system has had a poor record in advancing democratization. Elgie also concluded that president-parliamentary forms, which Taiwan uses, perform worse than premier-presidential forms in which the prime minister is responsible only to the legislature.

He also found that "cohabitation, " which means the president and the prime minister come from different political parties, and a divided minority government, do not result in failures of democratic transition.

The eventual abandoning of the semi-presidential system and the single nontransferable vote, which is regarded as the secret of one-party dominance, and the switch to a single-member simple plurality system in Taiwan, Japan and South Korea could be explained as a political reform and formation of a new order, while the old regime is collapsing, said Lin Jih-wen, a research fellow at Taiwan's Academia Sinica.

In another session, Benjamin Reilly, a professor from Australian National University, argued that recent political reform across Asia, including that of Taiwan, has seen the emergence of a more genuine "Asian model" of democracy that is moving closer to the Anglo-American system of "majoritarism, " electoral competition and two-party politics.

Guillermo O'Donnell, a professor of politics from the University of Notre Dame, delivered a keynote speech at the conference on democratic theories after the Third Wave.

The Third Wave of Democratization is a term coined by Samuel Huntington to describe the global trend that over 60 countries experienced democratic transition since 1974.