The Resurgence of Executive Primacy in the Age of Populism: Introduction to the Symposium

The articles in this issue, devoted to legal and constitutional issues around executive primacy and populism, were first presented at an Advanced Workshop on the Resurgence of Executive Primacy in the Age of Populism, organised by Professor Cheng-Yi Huang and held at the Institutum Jurisprudentiae of the Academica Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan on June 21 and 22, 2018. Scholarly interest in populism has grown over the past thirty years to the point where it could recently be the subject of The Oxford Handbook of Populism, published late in 2017. According to the editors of that volume, the bulk of scholarly analysis of populism since 1990 (outside the United States, at least) has been undertaken by political scientists. Some legal scholars have written about what we might call “popular constitutionalism,” which can be understood as referring to the theoretical and legal framework of liberal democracy. So far, however, public lawyers have not shown a great deal of interest in what we might call “populist constitutionalism,” which can be thought of as the theoretical and legal framework of “populism,” understood as a pathology of liberal democracy. The Taipei workshop was designed to encourage lawyers to think more carefully about legal tools, expressions, and implications of populism, if only because “the devil you know is easier to live and deal with than the devil you don’t.

Executive Primacy, Populism, and Public Law

As the articles in this Symposium suggest, populism and authoritarianism present ongoing challenges not only to liberal democracy but also to its legal underpinnings. Manipulation, avoidance, evasion, and outright rejection of the constitutional and legal frameworks of liberal democracy are features of populist authoritarianism. The basic argument of this article is that liberal-democratic public law and legal theory no longer satisfy human needs and desires because they were conceived in worlds that no longer exist, when the main pre-occupation was to secure liberty, not equality. The aim of the article is to explain the inherited structure of our public law and theory and the main events and developments that have produced this mismatch between public law and social aspiration

Reflection of low-frequency equatorial waves at arbitrary western boundaries

Procedures are developed for calculating effects of western boundaries of arbitrary geometry on low-frequency equatorial waves. We show that the mass flux incident at the coast is all returned eastward by equatorial Kelvin waves. Short Rossby waves generated as part of the reflection serve only to redistribute mass along the coast. For the case of a uniformly sloping coast we present formulae and graphical results for the amplitude of the equatorial Kelvin wave reflected at the coast due to incident free Rossby waves. Results are shown to depend on the single parameter γω where γ is the slope of the coast and ω is the nondimensional frequency. Similar results are presented for a special class of forced problems. Possible implications for equatorial currents in the Indian Ocean are discussed

A Model of the Semiannual Oscillation in the Equatorial Indian Ocean

Luyten and Roemmich have shown a strong semiannual signal in zonal velocity in the upper, western part of the equatorial Indian Ocean. Their observations are modeled by assuming that they are directly forced by the observed semiannual component of zonal wind stress, which is relatively large in the equatorial Indian Ocean. The model is linear, periodic, has linear damping, uses the long-wave approximation, and can be solved analytically. A good comparison with the observations is obtained for the phase of the oscillation across the array. The predicted magnitude is somewhat smaller than in the observations. The model sensitivity to friction and the spatial distribution of the wind stress is explored. Some additional model simplifications are discussed, but it is concluded that they all detract substantially from the comparison. The main conclusion is that the observations can be accounted for as a directly forced response to the semiannual component of the near-equatorial zonal winds

Influence of the barotropic mean flow on the width and the structure of the Atlantic Equatorial Deep Jets

A representation of an equatorial basin mode excited in a shallow water model for a single high order baroclinic vertical normal mode is used as a simple model for the equatorial deep jets. The model is linearized about both a state of rest and a barotropic mean flow corresponding to the observed Atlantic Equatorial Intermediate Current System. We found that the eastward mean flow associated with the North and South Intermediate Counter Currents (NICC and SICC, respectively) effectively shields the Equator from off-equatorial Rossby waves. The westward propagation of these waves is blocked and focusing on the Equator due to beta dispersion is prevented. This leads to less energetic jets along the Equator. On the other hand, the westward barotropic mean flow along the Equator reduces the gradient of absolute vorticity and hence widens the cross-equatorial structure of the basin mode. Increasing lateral viscosity predominantly affects the width of the basin modes’ Kelvin wave component in the presence of the mean flow while the Rossby wave is confined by the flanking NICC and SICC. Independent of the presence of the mean flow, the application of sufficient lateral mixing also hinders the focusing of off-equatorial Rossby waves, which is hence an unlikely feature of a low-frequency basin mode in the real ocean