The influence of a priori presuppositions of rationalism and irrationalism in the political subject upon the appraisal of the constitutional architecture determining the form of government

The aim of the study is to interpret the incomplete fulfillment of the purpose of a form of government based on the values of parliamentarism, applying an a priori axiomatic assumption of the rationality of the political actor and, correspondingly, of irrationality. The intended outcome of the research was to establish the relativity of the philosophical and political understanding of this issue and to refine the axiological methods of the theory of parliamentarism. However, the results demonstrated that when antinomic axiomatic a priori assumptions are applied, the theory does not arrive at opposite conclusions but, rather, at the same one. The purpose of a form of government grounded in the values of parliamentarism is the fullest possible realization of democracy. Yet a number of scholars argue that this function is performed imperfectly. This occurs due to the lack of genuine articulation of the population’s interests by the legislature through political parties. One contributing factor is the political passivity of the citizenry. When an a priori assumption of the individual’s irrationality, but the collective political subject’s rationality, is applied, the theory concludes that such passivity is inevitable, owing to the overly mediated mechanism through which political actors become aware of their interests. Conversely, under the opposite a priori assumption, passivity is explained by the individual’s disincentive to transmit his or her interest, given the imbalance between the effort required and the expected outcome. Conclusions. Any theoretical interpretation testifies to the relative failure of the form of government based on the values of parliamentarism, and the embodiment of the representative principle should be sought in other forms of government with the dominance of the executive power, since the representative principle can be embodied in it as well.