Publication details
Normativní základy principu dělby moci
| Title in English | The Normative Foundations of the Principle of the Separation of Powers |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The fifth chapter engages the concept, principle, and instrument of the separation of powers. Pavel Dufek and Jiří Baroš (aided indirectly by David Kosař who co-authored the three papers of which the chapter is a synthesis) observe that while the separation of powers constitutes the institutional and normative backbone of liberal democracies, contemporary democratic theory paid until very recently only scant attention to it – as opposed to constitutional and legal theory, which however tends to ignore what democratic theorists have to say. Baroš and Dufek analyse two basic objectives of the separation of powers – constraining (or “negative”) and enabling (“positive”) – and devote some attention to three basic types of justification for the latter, showing that they overlap with three types of legitimacy of political decision-making (input, output, and throughput). They then disaggregate the separation of powers into four components: separation of institutions, functions, and persons, plus the checks and balances component which, although often mistaken for the separation of powers as such, logically presupposes the three separations. This conceptual apparatus is then applied to recent events in Central European as well as Latin American countries, that is, regions where the rising wave of populism has had palpable impact on the separation of powers. The authors conclude that the complex internal logic of the separation of powers precludes devising a universal blueprint applicable to any given country, which in turn invites productive exchange between political philosophy, constitutional theory, and empirical social sciences. |
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