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

[goljerp]

One problem that I see with the Israeli parlimentary system is that the bar is so low, there's very little barrier to entry. So people create one-issue parties, and they end up with a seat or two in parliament. The problem is that these people then have a mandate one one issue, but don't care about anything else, really. But the major parties (formerly Labor and Likud; I don't know what they'll be now) who get 40-odd seats need the small parties in their coalitions, so will often give in to their demands so they can get power. Which means that it's possible for a very small, but dedicated, bunch of people influence national policy. An example is the religious parties: even though most Israelis are secular, the religious parties have historically had a lot of power because as long as Labor or Likud gave them what they wanted, they'd join in a government. Of course, my knowledge of Israeli politics is really several years old, and I think that the details have changed recently...

[cellio]

That's a good point; one-issue parties can have disproportionate influence. Though when building a coalition, wouldn't you try for the bigger groups first so there are fewer factions to manage? If you're down to haggling over some extremist party's two seats, aren't you in trouble anyway?

[goljerp]

When I was living in Israel, what happened was that Likud would get 40-something seats, Labo(u)r would get 35-40 seats, Shas got 8, and everyone else got 1 or 2 seats. So you pretty much had to haggle for the small parties if you weren't going to go for a "unity government". My numbers may be off, but the point is that there are a lot of small parties...

[cellio]

The last election was a little different. From Wikipedia:

Likud 38
Labour 19
Shinui-Mifleget Merkaz 15
Shas 11
National Union 7
Meretz 6
National Religious Party 6
Yahadut HaTorah 5
five other parties with 2-3 seats each

There seems to be more for Likud to work with now than there used to be, though it looks like Labor still has problems. (I'm assuming that Labor is unlikely to want to get into bed with Shas or NRP, for instance.)

[cellio]

To finish the thought... so the problem is that the religious parties, like NRP and Shas, aren't small. They do have a lot of influence, but they also have a lot of backing. Their opposition has more backing, so the coalition leader has to dance carefully.