Keyword

Axes

Upper Left Quadrant Details Upper Right Quadrant Details Lower Left Quadrant Details Lower Right Quadrant Details Details

Quadrants

Outline

The URQ is the classic Westminster model of majoritarian government, where electoral rules and party-systems tend to produce highly cohesive parliamentary majorities, thus strengthening the role of the executive both as a political authority and as a channel for bureaucratic implementation. While this remains a strongly admired and largely pursued model for majority-building, its successful application remains limited to a small number of countries. More often, the only way of forming parliamentary majorities is through weaker and unstable majorities (LRQ), made up by the temporary aggregation of a more or less vast array of minority interests. Parties are the main agent of coalition-building. The LLQ is concerned with the engineering of consensus through media, which set the agenda of public opinion demands and influence its choices. Media activism serves the need of elites for mass support through the creation of virtual majorities. The ULQ refers to the trend toward plebiscitarian democracies, where majorities coalesce around presidential leadership through a referendum type of election - whether by a formal ballot or through “permanent campaign” with popularity polling.