11 - The separation of powers

Summary

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

(Federalist papers, 47, James Madison)

Separations and divisions of power

In the last three chapters we have been concerned with what might be termed the basic structure of modern representative democracy – popular elections, the idea of representation itself, and political parties as the major vehicles of representation. In this chapter and the next, we turn our attention to a rather different class of constitutional and institutional structures that have as their shared theme the idea of the separation or division of powers – the idea, that is, that structuring the political process in a manner that divides and separates political power will serve the interests of citizens. The doctrine of the separation of powers is, of course, both old and almost universally supported. But what exactly does it entail? What does the separation of powers require at the operational level, and how exactly are the benefits to citizens generated? And does the argument for the separation of powers depend upon a particular model of politics? These are the key questions we wish to engage in this chapter and the next. Our first objective, then, is to nterrogate the definition of the separation of powers in an attempt to ease out its key ingredients.