judiciary is accepted but the executive and legislative powers work in
concert as a result of the government’s legislative majority.
Not all systems, however, fit easily into either of the above
constitutional moulds. The Derbyshires found twelve states with
what they described as dual executives that we describe here as
‘hybrid’ systems. For instance, both contemporary (2008) France and
Russia have adopted some features of each model with a directly
elected president with strong powers who appoints a prime minister
to head the administration who is also responsible to parliament. In
both cases it seems that the drafters of the constitution anticipated a
strong leader (de Gaulle, Yeltsin) faced by a scattering of weak
parties. The problem with this system is that the electorate may not
elect a legislature sympathetic to the political ideas of the president.
In France, on several occasions legislative elections have take place
after the presidential elections, and a new and different coalition of
political forces has clearly been in the ascendant. The president
has usually decided to ‘cohabit’ with the opposition forces – com-
promising on policy and government personnel. The alternative is to
confront the opposition and cause a constitutional crisis.
Possibly a more radical institutional reinterpretation of democracy
can be seen in what is sometimes called ‘consociational’ democracy. In
all liberal democratic systems a legitimate role is allotted to minority
(opposition) political forces outside of the government. In Britain this
is institutionalised in the term Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition.
In consociational democracy the attempt is made to ensure that all
significant minorities, as well as the majority, are actually repre-
sented in government. The best known, and most successful, example
of this is Switzerland where the government (the Federal Council) is
composed of representatives of all the major parties in parliament in
proportion to their strength.
Such an arrangement seems particularly suited to societies that
are deeply divided on national, linguistic or religious lines in
which important groups may be in a permanent minority. Thus in
Switzerland French, German and Italian speakers, Protestants and
Catholics, are all automatically represented in the government. Less
successful attempts at similar arrangements in other divided societies
include the Lebanon. An attempt to use such a device was in South
Africa’s 1994 constitution in which both the majority black (ANC)
and the minority white (Nationalist) populations were guaranteed144 STATES