Executive Democracy

20th century political philosophy holds that the two basic forms of government are democracy and authoritarianism, which are fundamentally opposed and incompatible. Classical political philosophy holds that the three basic forms of government are democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, which can be alloyed together in many combinations. The Classical model can explain many things which appear contradictory or outright impossible under the 20th century model—especially if you add bureaucracy as the fourth basic form.

In the past century, a fairly common political form is “executive democracy”—rule by a single leader who dominates the state to the same extent as classically-understood monarchs, like Dionysius of Syracuse in the 4th century BC or the Merovingian kings in the 5th century AD, and whose power is contingent on winning popular elections. Men like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Lee Kuan Yew, and Nayib Bukele control their governments at least as thoroughly as the average Greek tyrant or medieval king. If they lose an election, then they will in fact relinquish power—de Gaulle resigned in 1969 after losing a critical referendum with 47% of the vote.

Sometimes, an executive democracy is held in place only by the executive’s world-historical skill and will, and shifts to a different political form once he’s gone. The United States ceased to be an executive democracy when President Roosevelt died and President Truman took his place. Athens ceased to be an executive democracy when Pericles died and no one else could match his ability to reliably persuade the assembly—as Thucydides describes it, “what was nominally a democracy was becoming in his hands government by the first citizen. With his successors it was different. More on a level with one another, and each grasping at supremacy, they ended by committing even the conduct of state affairs to the whims of the multitude.” (2.65.9-10) Sometimes, an executive democracy is a stable political form which can endure with a series of merely competent leaders. The Botswana Democratic Party’s five semi-dynastic presidents ruled the country from its independence in 1966 until their first electoral defeat in 2024.

Of course no single leader is literally omnipotent. Even very powerful monarchs, like Cyrus the Great or Henry VIII or President Roosevelt, must manage the elites and deal with internal factions, and will suffer their share of local defeats in the internal power struggles that happen in every government.

While 20th century ideology munges together the concepts of elections, separation of powers, and liberalism, these are actually completely different things which can occur separately, and often do. The idea of an absolute leader who rules only so long as he keeps winning elections seems like a contradiction in terms from within this ideological frame. But empirically we see them fairly often. This causes some ideological twisting and gyrating among commentators attempting to square the circle, often by insisting that an executive democracy can only be a transitional stage on the road to a self-coup imposing an authoritarian dictatorship backed by repressive secret police. These people are often surprised when the ideologically inconvenient executive eventually loses an election and concedes power in accordance with the normal practice of the law, as we saw with Viktor Orbán’s electoral defeat earlier this year.

Like any political form, executive democracy occurs in both functional and dysfunctional instances depending on the individuals who make it up—mainly the executive, in this case—and has its own particular advantages and weaknesses. From the perspective of democratic legitimacy, its main advantage is that the lines of accountability are very clear, especially compared to the electoral bureaucracy which prevails in the United States and most other Western countries. Structurally an electoral bureaucracy suffers from extreme diffusion of responsibility, where no individual is to blame for any particular failure, and there is no democratic mechanism by which the people can bring their will to bear. Often the bureaucrat class pursues its class interests in ways which the people collectively hate, since the people have no practical way of disciplining the bureaucrats. In contrast, in an executive democracy, individual ministers and legislators are accountable to the executive, who manages his party’s internal structure. Meanwhile the executive is accountable to the people, who can and will throw him out—and thereby also his lieutenants—if they don’t like how things are going overall. The people don’t have to track the intricacies of each individual policy, like whether housing costs are too high because zoning is too lax or too lenient, or other questions which are often too abstruse for most people to reach well-justified conclusions. They can simply vote out the executive because housing costs are too high, or reelect the executive because crime is down.

Executive bureaucracy is certainly not the best political form—there is no “best political form”, there is only ever a political form which functions well with the available ruling cadre, and is adapted to the nation’s present needs. It is merely one of the political forms which occurs fairly often, and it is best understood in mechanistic terms rather than ideological terms.