parliamentary government

[cellio]

I've never lived under a parliamentary government, and watching them from the outside can sometimes be confusing. Most of my "information" comes from watching Israeli politics, with occasional supplements from Canada; I realize these aren't the only such governments and that each country presumably has its own quirks. But there are some things I wonder about, including wondering which ones are inherrent properties and which are quirks.

I infer that creating new political parties -- that have standing to run in national elections, I mean -- is fairly easy. Israel has a plethora of parties. Sharon is quitting his own party to form a new one, and the last election saw a new party that was one of the top three vote-getters. In the US this is hard; there are lots of parties, but the Democrats and Republicans have privileged access to both the ballot and tax-funded campaign money, so it's not a level playing field. From the outside, it looks like Sharon's new party will occupy the same niche as that new party from last time (Shinui) -- but presumably it would be a sign of political weakness for him to just join the party he ran against, while the cost of starting a new one is low, so he forms his own. Because it's a coalition government, he and those other guys may well end up in the same voting block anyway.

Is that sort of thing the reason that there are bunches of small parties, most of which secures its 3 or 4 seats in a 120-seat parliament? Do parties ever die off? Do prominent players ever change parties, as opposed to creating new ones? Or, alternatively, do you get a lot of one-off parties, ones that are formed for one election and then fade away?

I find the idea of proportional seats in government (based on the vote split) to be interesting. It's a stark contrast to what we have in the US, where in each race the winner takes all. The only thing that keeps the ruling party from running roughshod over everyone -- when anything does, I mean -- is that there are lots of these races. I wonder how different US politics would be if Congress were made up of Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens, Constitutionalists, and whatever else in rough proportion to their distribution in the population, with the president being not individually elected but the head of the party that got the most votes. (I perceive that our president has roughly the powers of a prime minister in the parliamentary system.) On the other hand, in a system like Israel's the elected representatives aren't individually accountable to the voters, so it can be hard for the people to remove someone they don't like.

The ever-changing bedfellows of parliamentary governments can get hard to follow without a score-card. I sometimes wonder how they get anything done. (But that can be a feature. :-) )

Speaking of getting things done, I couldn't find an answer to this at Wikipedia: between the time the parliament is disolved and the time elections are held, how does governance happen? For example, the Israeli parliament was dissolved today and elections will be in February or March; who makes decisions in the meantime? Or does this mean they're in a mode of "administration but not law-making"? (Is that a relevant difference? Which category would contain the budget?)

Comments

Professor Internet Responds

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Between now and new elections the Israeli government still remains the government, but will not pass major legislation. The idea of a "lame duck" is obviously in the US system as well (in which the executive branch does not even necessarily have majority legislative support). Until 1933 the new president/Congress didn't even take office until March, which is quite a long time after a November election. (The assumption, like that of many state legislatures today, was that the legislature really doesn't need to be in session for the whole year.)

Any system can be designed to deal with the principle of coalitions in different ways. I'd argue that America does has coalition governments -- it's just that the coalitions take place before the election, not afterward. Free-marketeers and the religious right are both Republicans where in Israel (or Europe) they'd be different parties who forged an alliance after the election. This all derives from the structure of our system: in America we have a two party system not just because of institutional duopoly but because of the first-past-the-post system of all elections, where a vote for the loser is "thrown away" (ie unrepresented in who wins the particular seat and thus shares in the spoils of power).

The first-past-the-post system means that 50% plus 1 is absolutely necessary to having any chance of winning power. So, there is strong pressure on the big parties to compromise and cut deals with potential splitters. Classically the instrument for doing this was the party platform -- a platform that was too narrow might make a group walk out of the convention, forming a third party that would cripple the ability of the first party to win a majority of the votes. Ultimately they may even go over to the other side (as southern white Democrats did after forming their own party in 1948, through the 1970s). So there are "coalition governments" here -- just that the agreements making them are less formal.

The chief virtue of this kind of system is its stability, its chief defect a lack of a stake in making people vote. (Your vote doesn't "count" if you voted for a losing candidate.) Israel's system is kind of an extreme on the other side of the spectrum. I'm not sure what you refer to about "the only thing that keeps the ruling party from running roughshod" etc. In a pure parliamentary system like Britain's, all that keeps a large majority party from running roughshod is... the party's own conscience, which is why it's sometimes referred to as elected dictatorship. That's the logical outcome of democracy: the will of the voters, now enshrined in a government, is more or less absolute.

In the US, on the other hand, the principle of separation of powers is heavily built into the system. It very rarely happens that one party controls all the levers of power from dog catcher to president -- and even then, there are the courts. Just ask FDR: the American system is basically designed to make it very difficult for anything dramatic to get done without consensus from all those different layers, which is why American government is both much more limited than in other countries, and less democratically responsive. When you get a system designed to make it impossible to ever abolish slavery -- which is basically what the constitution was when ratified -- the rest more or less flows naturally.

Re: Professor Internet Responds

[cellio]

Thanks for the interesting comment. You're right that we have coalitions too; I wonder how significant the difference is between forming them before (so the voters know who's in) and after. I think the much bigger factor is our first-past-the-post system, where many voters are disenfranchised.

I'm not sure what you refer to about "the only thing that keeps the ruling party from running roughshod" etc.

I mean that in the US, you will sometimes see voters rebel and oust an incumbent in the next election. If you're voting for a party, though, and the leaders of that party don't have a problem with that individual, then your only power is to vote for a different party -- which you might not want to do if you like most of the slate. So instead of ousting someone at the polls, you have to work through the party and convince the party leadership. Parties vote on some positions (as we've just seen), but at least in Israel my impression is that rank-and-file party members don't vote on the lists of knesset candidates (either their names or their rankings).

Just ask FDR: the American system is basically designed to make it very difficult for anything dramatic to get done without consensus from all those different layers,

Do you need consensus from all the layers, or from all the branches at a given layer? For example, it seems quite dangerous to have the same party dominate the white house, Congress, and Supreme Court. Is it similarly dangerous if the same party holds the white house and most of the governorships, but not Congress?

Re: Professor Internet Responds

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

In terms of individual accountability, you're right that the names on the list are not accountable to voters -- but I suppose the fiction of "local representation" means less in a country as small as Israel. There are ways of accommodating the representation principle into a proportional-parliamentary system; in Ireland, for example, people vote for a representative, but then the "at-large" seats in the parliament are distributed so that the total tally of seats reflects the nation's proportional vote for each party. I've always thought that was a nice way to solve the problem.

Do you need consensus from all the layers, or from all the branches at a given layer?

Well, the opposition of state(s) in the US can often thwart federal power if it is determined enough, since states have a much better developed bureaucratic apparatus for administering things people care about. There are no federal school or election boards, or motor vehicle registries, for instance. Most of your interaction with the power of "the state" is with state officials. The great example would be in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Ed, where most southern states refused for many years to undertake any form of integration, or found creative ways to evade the court's plans. Open defiance could be countered with the National Guard, but desegregating the whole South via the Guard was untenable, so it didn't happen.