Parliamentary system
 |
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2010) |
Constitutional monarchies in which authority is vested in a parliament.
Parliamentary republics where parliaments are effectively supreme over a separate head of state.
Parliamentary republics with an executive president elected by and responsible to a parliament.
| Part of the Politics series |
| Politics |
|---|
|
|
| Subseries |
| Politics portal |
A parliamentary system is a system of government in which the ministers of the executive branch get their democratic legitimacy from the legislature and are accountable to that body, such that the executive and legislative branches are intertwined.
Contents |
[edit] Background
Scholars of democracy such as Arend Lijphart divide parliamentary democracies into two different systems, the Westminster and Consensus systems.[1]
- The Westminster system is usually found in Commonwealth of Nations, although it is not universal within nor exclusive to Commonwealth countries. These parliaments tend to have a more adversarial style of debate and the plenary session of parliament is more important than committees. Some parliaments in this model are elected using a plurality voting system (first past the post), such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and India, while others use proportional representation, such as Ireland and New Zealand. The Australian House of Representatives is elected using instant-runoff voting while the Senate is elected using proportional representation through single transferable vote. Regardless of which system is used, the voting systems tend to allow the voter to vote for a named candidate rather than a closed list.
- Western European parliamentary model (e.g., Spain, Germany) tend to have a more consensual debating system, and usually have semi-cyclical debating chambers. Consensus systems have more of a tendency to use proportional representation with open party lists than the Westminster Model legislatures. The committees of these Parliaments tend to be more important than the plenary chamber. A specific example is sometimes called the West German Model since its earliest exemplar in its final form was in the Bundestag of West Germany (which became the Bundestag of Germany upon the absorption of the GDR by the FRG). Unlike in Germany however, some West European countries' parliaments (e.g., the Netherlands and Sweden) implement the principle of dualism as a form of separation of powers. In countries using this system, Members of Parliament have to resign their place in Parliament upon being appointed (or elected) minister. However, ministers in those countries usually actively participate in parliamentary debates - the main difference being their inability to vote.
There also exists a Hybrid Model, the semi-presidential system, drawing on both presidential systems and parliamentary systems, for example the French Fifth Republic.
Implementations of the parliamentary system can also differ on whether the government needs the explicit approval of the parliament to form, rather than just the absence of its disapproval, and under what conditions (if any) the government has the right to dissolve the parliament, like Jamaica and many others.[citation needed]
A Parliamentary system may consist of two styles of Chambers of Parliament one with two chambers (or houses): an elected lower house, and an upper house or Senate which may be appointed or elected by a different mechanism from the lower house. This style of two houses is called bicameral system. Legislatures with only one house are known as unicameral system.[citation needed]
Parliamentarianism may also be for governance in local governments. An example is the city of Oslo, which has an executive council (Byråd) as a part of the parliamentary system.
[edit] History
The parliamentary system first emerged in Sweden during the Age of Liberty 1718-1772 (ending abruptly with a royal coup d'etat in 1772) and in Great Britain at about the same time. Frederick, Lord North was the first prime minister to be forced to resign as a result of a parliamentary vote of no confidence, thus establishing the principle that the prime minister must enjoy the confidence of Parliament if he is to remain in office. Another early adopter of parliamentary government was Norway, whose Parliament Stortinget forced the King to appoint opposition leader Johan Sverdrup to the premiership in 1884. This event inspired the gradual reestablishment of parliamentary government in Sweden 1905-1917.
[edit] Advantages of parliamentary systems
One of the commonly attributed advantages to parliamentary systems is that it's faster and easier to pass legislation.[2] This is because the executive branch is dependent upon the direct or indirect support of the legislative branch and often includes members of the legislature. Thus, this would amount to the executive (as the majority party or coalition of parties in the legislature) possessing more votes in order to pass legislation. In a presidential system, the executive is often chosen independently from the legislature. If the executive and legislature in such a system include members entirely or predominantly from different political parties, then stalemate can occur. Accordingly, the executive within a presidential system might not be able to properly implement his or her platform/manifesto. Evidently, an executive in any system (be it parliamentary, presidential or semi-presidential) is chiefly voted into office on the basis of his or her party's platform/manifesto. It could be said then that the will of the people is more easily instituted within a parliamentary system.[citation needed]
In addition to quicker legislative action, Parliamentarianism has attractive features for nations that are ethnically, racially, or ideologically divided. In a unipersonal presidential system, all executive power is vested in the president. In a parliamentary system, with a collegial executive, power is more divided. In the 1989 Lebanese Taif Agreement, in order to give Muslims greater political power, Lebanon moved from a semi-presidential system with a strong president to a system more structurally similar to classical parliamentarianism. Iraq similarly disdained a presidential system out of fears that such a system would be tantamount to Shiite domination; Afghanistan's minorities refused to go along with a presidency as strong as the Pashtuns desired.[citation needed]
It can also be argued that power is more evenly spread out in the power structure of parliamentarianism. The prime minister seldom tends to have as high importance as a ruling president, and there tends to be a higher focus on voting for a party and its political ideas than voting for an actual person.[citation needed]
In The English Constitution, Walter Bagehot praised parliamentarianism for producing serious debates, for allowing the change in power without an election, and for allowing elections at any time. Bagehot considered the four-year election rule of the United States to be unnatural.[citation needed]
There is also a body of scholarship, associated with Juan Linz, Fred Riggs, Bruce Ackerman, and Robert Dahl that claims that parliamentarianism is less prone to authoritarian collapse. These scholars point out that since World War II, two-thirds of Third World countries establishing parliamentary governments successfully made the transition to democracy. By contrast, no Third World presidential system successfully made the transition to democracy without experiencing coups and other constitutional breakdowns.[citation needed]
A recent World Bank study found that parliamentary systems are associated with lower corruption.[3]
[edit] Criticisms of parliamentarianism
One of the main criticisms of many parliamentary systems is that the head of government is in almost all cases not directly elected. In a presidential system, the president is usually chosen directly by the electorate, or by a set of electors directly chosen by the people, separate from the legislature (see Electoral college). However, in a parliamentary system the prime minister is elected by the legislature, often under the strong influence of the party leadership. Thus, a party's candidate for the head of government is usually known before the election, possibly making the election as much about the person as the party behind him or her.[citation needed]
Some constituencies may have a popular local candidate under an unpopular leader (or the reverse), forcing a difficult choice on the electorate. Mixed member proportional representation (where voters cast two ballots) can make this choice easier by allowing voters to cast one vote for the local candidate but also cast a second vote for another party.
Although Walter Bagehot praised parliamentarianism for allowing an election to take place at any time, the lack of a definite election calendar can be abused. Previously under some systems, such as the British, a ruling party can schedule elections when it feels that it is likely to do well, and so avoid elections at times of unpopularity - however election timing is now fixed under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. Thus, by wise timing of elections, in a parliamentary system a party can extend its rule for longer than is feasible in a functioning presidential system. This problem can be alleviated somewhat by setting fixed dates for parliamentary elections, as is the case in several of Australia's state parliaments. In other systems, such as the Dutch and the Belgian, the ruling party or coalition has some flexibility in determining the election date. Conversely, flexibility in the timing of parliamentary elections avoids having periods of legislative gridlock that can occur in a fixed period presidential system.[citation needed]
Critics of the Westminster parliamentary system point out that people with significant popular support in the community are prevented from becoming prime minister if they cannot get elected to parliament since there is no option to "run for prime minister" like one can run for president under a presidential system. Additionally, prime ministers may lose their positions solely because they lose their seats in parliament, even though they may still be popular nationally. Supporters of parliamentarianism can respond by saying that as members of parliament, prime ministers are elected firstly to represent their electoral constituents and if they lose their support then consequently they are no longer entitled to be prime minister.[citation needed] This is, however, a moot point if proportional representation is used.
The Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler included several critiques of parliamentarianism in his book Mein Kampf, writing that the Nazi movement was "anti-parliamentarian" because it rejects "a principle of majority rule in which the leader is degraded to the level of mere executant of other people's wills and opinion" and further that "By rejecting the authority of the individual and replacing it by the numbers of some momentary mob, the parliamentary principle of majority rule sins against the basic aristocratic principle of Nature".
[edit] Countries with a parliamentary system of government
[edit] Unicameral system
This table shows countries with parliament consisting of a single house.
[edit] Bicameral system
This table shows organisations and countries with parliament consisting of two houses.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Lijphart, Arend (1999). Patterns of democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- ^ T. St. John N. Bates (1986), "Parliament, Policy and Delegated Power", Statute Law Review (Oxford: Oxford University Press), http://slr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/7/2/114.pdf
- ^ SSRN-Accountability and Corruption: Political Institutions Matter by Daniel Lederman, Norman Loayza, Rodrigo Soares
- ^ The Council of Union is defined in the constitution of Iraq but does not currently exist.
- ^ Lakota, Igor (2006) (in Slovene). Sistem nepopolne dvodomnosti v slovenskem parlamentu (diplomska naloga) [The system of incomplete bicameralism in the Slovenian Parliament (diploma thesis)]. Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. p. 59. http://dk.fdv.uni-lj.si/dela/Lakota-Igor.PDF. Retrieved 16 December 2010.
