ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the comparative study of institutional design and democratic performance. Institutional design involves the actual choice and set of institutions within a country that both link the citizens to the government and shape the relationship among its various branches. Institutions are related to democratic performance since they embody the representative and accountability functions of democracy and structure the ways in which political conflicts under democratic rule are mediated, and the ways in which distributional questions are settled. In this sense, they are linked to both the intrinsic (representation, accountability, and rights) and extrinsic (resource allocation and distribution) dimensions of democracy. Different combinations of institutional arrangements and their relationship to democratic performance are particularly relevant for scholars and politicians alike who have an interest in the stability and survivability of the third-wave democracies (Mainwaring 1993; Jones 1995; Foweraker and Landman 2002).
