Juan Linz (1926-2013), Hamid Karzai,

Karzai Is Planning to Be There for a Successor. Right There. By MATTHEW ROSENBERG Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's president, is moving next door to the presidential palace after his final term ends and shows every sign of maintaining his influence over whoever succeeds him.

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Juan José Linz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Linz‎

Juan José Linz (24 December 1926 – 1 October 2013) was a Spanish sociologist and political scientist. He was Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science ...

.....其中一篇「地下經典」便是期後著名的〈總統制的危險〉一文。Linz認為總統制缺陷重重：

1. 總統選舉是零和博弈，勝者全勝，引發對抗政治；
2. 總統集國家元首和政府首腦於一身，容易行事獨斷；
3. 行政立法衝突可引致政府癱瘓；
4. 因為總統任期固定，不能隨時召開大選重組內閣，總統制的「穩定」反過來令政治危機無從消解；
5. 總統在任期終結前，行事容易專橫獨斷。

此文對大多採用美國總統制的新興民主國家可謂當頭棒喝！---

http://chankinman.wordpress.com/2007/08/20/juan-linz



 As Linz wrote in his 1990 paper “The Perils of Presidentialism,” when conflict breaks out in such a system, “there is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved, and the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate.”

Juan Linz’s Bad News for America

The Yale political scientist died this week. His life’s work tells us that American democracy is doomed.

By Matthew Yglesias

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/10/juan_linz_dies_yale_political_scientist_explains_why_government_by_crisis.html

  ...His publications include Crisis, Breakdown and Reequilibration, an introductory volume to The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes; “Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes”; Problems of a Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Southern Europe, South America and Post-Communist Europe, with Alfred Stepan; The Failure of Presidential Democracy; Sultanistic Regimes, with Houchang Chehabi; Robert Michels. Political Sciology and the Future of Democracy. Conflicto en Euskadi; and essays and monographs on Spanish politics and society in edited volumes. His research on the sociology of fascist movements has been published in Reader’s Guide to Fascism and Who Were the Fascists? and he is co-editor (with L. Diamond and S. M. Lipset) of a four-volume work Democracy in Developing Countries. His writings have been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, French, Japanse, Chinese, Korean and Turkish.