Basically, I want to ask how accepted is the idea that fusion of powers between the executive and legislative, present in the Westminster-inspired systems, implies a democratic deficit of some kind. (I'm making the question more objective/operational in the second half of my post.)
This question is inspired by my reading of mod Philipp's statement:
Does the executive refuse to do anything unless the legislature makes a law which tells them to? [Then you have] Democracy. [Otherwise it's more questionable, i.e. it smacks of some kind of democratic deficit.]
I have no doubt that some (or even many) in Germany might hold this view. Germany has more separation of powers between its legislative and executive than even the US does, given how the German Constitutional Court has sometimes interpreted Article 80(1) or their Basic Law, e.g. for an extreme example:
In 1964 it [the Coustitiona Court] struck down an authorization [given by the legislative to the executive] to define the statutory term "ton-kilometer" for purposes of determining the amount of a tax on the transportation of freight.
I'm curious however if this view that fusion of powers (between legislature and executive) is bad for democracy is accepted broadly enough world-wide. For example:
Are there well-known democracy indexes that penalize countries for (the aforementioned) fusions powers?
Is fusion of powers penalized in some other political evaluation criteria, e.g. accession to the EU? (I'm pretty sure they penalize a non-independent judiciary, but that's another separation-of-powers matter which I'm not asking about in this question.)
