Wiarda, Howard J.; Polk, Jonathan T. --- "Separation of Legislative and Executive Governmental Powers" [2012] ELECD 765; in Clark, S. David (ed), "Comparative Law and Society" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Comparative Law and Society

Editor(s): Clark, S. David

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849803618

Section: Chapter 8

Section Title: Separation of Legislative and Executive Governmental Powers

Author(s): Wiarda, Howard J.; Polk, Jonathan T.

Number of pages: 18

Extract:

8 Separation of legislative and executive
governmental powers
Howard J. Wiarda and Jonathan T. Polk* 1




1 INTRODUCTION

Prior to the Second World War, comparative politics largely focused on the formal and
legal aspects of government, including diverse configurations of the executive and legisla-
tive body. Analyses generally consisted of case studies, drawn almost exclusively from the
United States or Europe, with an emphasis on the constitution and other institutional
arrangements of various states. This both reflected the legal background of the discipline
at the time and stemmed from the legitimate postwar need, well into the 1950s, to build
institutions from the ground up. Woodrow Wilson's Congressional Government (1885), an
analysis and comparison of the political system of the United States with that of Great
Britain, stands as a fine example of the importance and prominence of investigations
detailing various institutional configurations for the nascent field of political science, or
what at the time might have more properly been called comparative government. The
work of Herman Finer (1949), Karl Loewenstein (1957) and Carl Friedrich (1950) further
represent foundational texts of the formal-legal approach common to early comparative
analysis.
As the war came to a close and a host of new states entered the world political scene,
there was a corresponding call for change within comparative politics. Authors such as
David Easton (1953) and Roy Macridis (1955) encouraged comparativists to move away
from their interest in static institutional analysis, and increasingly focus on the political
actors and processes that ...