A review of The Failure of Presidential Democracy, edited by Juan J. Linz and Arturo Valenzuela.
About the Author
Matthew Soberg Shugart, associate professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, is the coauthor of Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics (1992).
It is fine to acknowledge the importance of law-based rule to the eventual rise of modern democracy, but we must not overlook the even greater contribution of the idea of…