Corruption Of Power

1522 Words4 Pages

Leslie Zepeda
5/14/2014
Political Science 101
Corruption
The principle of separation of powers where the executive, legislative, and judicial functions of government are separated into independent bodies, is the key elment of governinence in democratic nations. Seperation of powers requires multiple individuals to initiate, propose, or run the agenda, and it is also designed to protect the government form political tyranny. However, although separation of powers is a key element in democratic nations, it does not prevent the misuse of power. The constitutional design that does prevent the misuse of power ids is known as checks and balances. Check and balances empower the separate actors to evade or sieze the actions of other actors. This is often done with the practice of judicial review, vetoes, or regulatory oversight who strive to ensure all political power is used accordingly. Although the constitutional design of government has been practiced for centuries, the abuse of political power remains an issue in many counties includes developed democracies. The corruption is done in a variety of ways such as covering the spectrum form enacting legislation for thje benefit of smaller groups of supporters or voters to more direct corruption as receiving payments for political favors. Many individuals who reside in democratic nations believe separation of powers combined with checks and balances ensure the government remains fair and incurropt. However, this belief is very difficult to prove because of the issue in defining an operatonal measure of checks and balances for a cross-country seeting, and missing counterfactuals in the seperatoin of powers. In this paper I will show recent work in poilitical agency withj data on corru...

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...means the Court cannot issue advisory opinions on legislation. In addition, a party bringing suit must have standing (a direct stake in the outcome) in order to challenge a statute.
The most important rule of judicial restraint is that statutes are presumptively valid, which means that judges assume legislators did not intend to violate the Constitution. It follows that the Burden of Proof is on the party that raises the issue of unconstitutionality. In addition, if a court can construe a disputed statute in a manner that allows it to remain intact without tampering with the meaning of the words or if a court can decide a case on nonconstitutional grounds, these courses are to be preferred. Finally, a court will not sit in judgment of the motives or wisdom of legislators, nor will it hold a statute invalid merely because it is deemed to be unwise or undemocratic.

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