Beyond Checks and Balances: The Political Purpose of the Separation of Powers (Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism)

An argument for understanding the separation of powers as a political arrangement designed to pursue the common democratic goodBeyond Checks and Balances seeks to rescue the democratic concept of the separation of powers from a popular caricature of it: that checks and balances exist between branches of government to frustrate, slow, and inhibit change.Long regarded as a legal doctrine that must be adjudicated by the federal courts, political scientists Connor M.Ewing, Benjamin A. Kleinerman, and Charles U. Zug have gathered leading scholars' analyses into a volume that argues that the separation of powers is instead best understood politically.When cast as a configuration of powers, incentives, and institutions designed to pursue the foundational ends of politics, it becomes clear that separation of powers does not exist to stymie collective action, though it certainly is capable of doing so. The book is divided into two sections: the first examines the foundations of statement-of-pow