The forthcoming article “Designing Confucian democracy: A semi-parliamentarian framework” by Zhichao Tong is summarized by the author below.
Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of theoretical studies on Confucian democracy, which is increasingly taken by a group of scholars known as “Confucian democrats” to be a mode of democracy best suitable for East Asian societies with a Confucian heritage. Still, despite the establishment of Confucian democracy as a normatively plausible ideal, little has been said regarding its institutional design. Yet, to the extent that Confucian democracy inevitably involves some synthesis between a formally democratic regime and substantively Confucian ends, it has to ask for a more specific choice among various possible democratic institutional frameworks, so as to make sure that the exact form of the former is conducive to the realization of the latter. This article addresses such a question by presenting semi-parliamentarianism as an appropriate institutional framework for designing Confucian democracy. My central claim is that compared with other types of constitutional structure such as presidentialism, parliamentarianism, and semi-presidentialism, semi-parliamentarianism is more likely to simultaneously advance Confucian democrats’ dual normative commitments, which I summarize as benevolent government and deep harmony.
Within the broader field of democratic theory and comparative politics, semi-parliamentarian is a distinct model of democratic design that has been most comprehensively articulated by Steffen Ganghof in his 2021 monograph Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism. The basic idea is that there should be two democratically composed chambers which together share the legislative power, but with only of them, the so-called confidence chamber, having the power to choose the cabinet and to dismiss it via a no-confidence vote. A good case of comparison would be with semi-presidentialism which divides the executive into two parts, the presidency and the cabinet led by a prime minister, and makes one of them, the cabinet, accountable to the legislature. Semi-parliamentarianism could be viewed as the exact opposite, that is, dividing the legislature into two parts via bicameralism and having one of them, the confidence chamber, to hold the executive into account.
Drawing on but also somewhat departing from Ganghof’s arguments, I consider how the two chambers of a bicameral semi-parliamentarian Confucian democracy should be constituted and arranged in a way that would simultaneously promote benevolent government and deep harmony in a modern pluralistic society. To make my normative claim more empirically grounded, I also examine major political challenges currently faced by East Asian democracies including South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, in what exact sense those challenges are problematic from a democratic perspective and a Confucian perspective, and how semi-parliamentarianism may help to address them. In this regard, the article aims to speak to both normative political theorists and empirical political scientists.
About the Author: Zhichao Tong is currently an Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the School of Government at Sun Yat-Sen University. Their research “Designing Confucian democracy: A semi-parliamentarian framework” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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