What in your opinion are the benefits of a Parliamentary system or if you don’t think so what are the disadvantages?
As opposed to what? Hard to answer without knowing what we’re supposed to be comparing it to.
Excuse me, a presidential system.
To me, one of the good things is that the parliamentary system separates the head of government and the head of state. The head of state takes on the symbolic impressive roles, representing the nation, while the head of government is just another politician, slagging and getting slagged.
In the US, the President is both head of government and head of state, which leads to confusion between ‘respecting the office’ and ‘rescpecting the occupant of the office’, and it becomes difficult to criticize the President without criticizing the nation. And when something becomes difficult to criticize, trouble builds up.
Does a parliamentary system necessarily mean a system in which seats in said parliament are allocated based on overall vote percentage? That is, a system in which third parties are able to actually gain seats (rather than just play spoiler to the two major parties)? Or is that just a specific type of parliamentary system?
I think the fundamental flaw of democracy is rational ignorance. That is, your vote doesn’t count and everyone knows that. So political positions are more about signaling - showing what a productive, upright citizen you are (if Republican) or what a caring, morally enlightened person you are (if Democrat), and nobody has to live with the society-wide consequences of their ideology.
Parliamentary systems break up the unitary left-right spectrum, so we can have more as many parties with any combinations of ideologies we like, each of which is proportionally influential. In an intellectual sense this is satisfying: the rigid grouping of each position as “left vs right” doesn’t really make sense. But from a policy perspective, this can encourage more people to become even more polarized than they are already, signalling their moral superiority to extreme lengths, with everyone else again paying the price. So we’d have the Whacko Greenie Party and the Jackbooted Fascist party, each of which will have more influence than they do now as fringe groups.
Forcing people to recognize reality, and make political compromises is good. The two-party system may be flawed but at least it forces folks to make compromises with half of the voters in the nation. Whatever intellectual appeal the parliamentary system has is dwarfed by its amplification of the rational ignorance problem.
Probably the fundamental advantage of a parliamentary system over a presidential system is that it forces unified political control of the government (“government” in the American sense, not the British sense). That would also be the disadvantage of a parliamentary system over a presidential system.
In a parliamentary system, whoever wins a majority in the parliament gets to govern the country, controlling both the legislative and executive functions of state. In theory, this should ensure that elections mean something: You favor the policies of the Blues over the Reds, so you vote for the Blues. If the Blues get elected, they get to enact their agenda. You don’t have one party controlling one branch of government and the other party controlling the other branch of government, with both branches necessary to enact legislation or get anything done, and wind up with a situation where both parties can blame the other party for being obstructionist, and in the meantime important issues aren’t dealt with, and voters wonder why the hell they bothered to go vote. Furthermore, in a presidential system, even if both the executive and the legislature are controlled by people who are nominally from the same party, their political careers don’t depend on each other–if the congress fails to pass the centerpiece of the president’s agenda, or the president vetoes the major bill passed by the congress, they don’t all have to immediately run for re-election. They don’t necessarily, except in the loosest sense, run on the same “ticket”, and they may be elected with staggered terms. Instead of reasonably cohesive political parties, each politician tends to be separately elected from all the others, and may free to act as he or she sees fit. In the United States, rather than just two parties there are in some ways 536 “parties”–the President, 100 Senators, and 435 Representatives, each of whom is fundamentally autonomous–and you need a coalition of 269 or 279 of them to get anything done*. As a result, even when one party controls both the legislature and the presidency, you can still get gridlock.
This is not to say a parliamentary system can’t wind up with structural issues which make it ineffective:
No, the system of elections–first-past-the-post or various sorts of proportional representation–is a separate thing from parliamentary vs. presidential. And the type of voting system chosen can gridlock a parliamentary system just as bad or worse than a presidential system: You can wind up with a parliament which inherently contains many small parties, rather than two or a handful, so that every government (“government” in the British sense) is a fragile coalition which is unable to deal with any important issues, and soon fails, forcing another round of elections. Small parties on the fringes of the society’s politics may be able to extract concessions from the larger parties, as the handful of seats the small parties command may nonetheless be necessary to gain a majority in parliament and form a government, giving them political power way out of proportion to their actual level of support in society at large.
Of course, supporters of presidential systems (or proportional representation in a parliamentary system) would argue these are not bugs, they’re features. The American granddaddy of presidencies is part of an overall constitutional system that is pretty much designed to result in “gridlock”–in civics class, they call this “checks and balances”–to prevent anyone from getting too much power and to ensure that the majority can’t run roughshod over minorities. The fundamental American constitutional philosophy is that it’s supposed to be hard to get anything done, in order to keep anyone from doing something really bad. Supporters of those proportional systems which produce lots of small parties could argue the same thing, that is is good that small “fringe” points of view get a chance to have a seat at the table. A well-oiled parliamentary system, with first-past-the-post or some voting system which tends to produce two or at most several political parties, may be characterized by its critics as an “elective dictatorship”: To oversimplify, you vote in the Blues, the leader of the Blues becomes prime minister by virtue of the Blue majority in parliament, and the new prime minister then proceeds to do whatever he or she wants until constitutionally forced to call new elections. At that point, voters can decide they like the current regime and wish to keep it, or decide to chuck it and go with the Reds (or maybe the Greens).
269 without the filibuster*: 1 President, 50 Senators (since the Vice President is not politically independent from the President and can therefore be relied on to break the tie in the Senate in the President’s favor) and 218 Representatives. With the filibuster, you need 60 Senators, not 50. Again, supporters of presidential systems would argue that it’s a feature not a bug to leave each elected representative free to follow his or her own judgment about what ought to be done for the good of the country, instead of being subject to strong party discipline, and that the sort of wheeling-and-dealing and coalition building needed to enact major policy that is traditional in American politics is a strength of the system that forces compromises which in the long run are better for the country as a whole.
**I think the filibuster has had the effect of making the American system sort of “hyper-presidential” when it comes to “checks and balances”. Even if one party controls the Presidency and has comfortable majorities in both houses of Congress, they still may have serious difficulty in enacting the agenda they were elected on, unless they can secure a super-majority in the Senate.
But “parliamentary vs. presidential” is a separate thing from “two party vs. multiparty”. There are parliamentary systems with only two major parties. (I’m not sure what a multi-party system would look like in a presidential republic. I suspect the legislature might wind up being weak and ineffectual, and whoever managed to get elected president would therefore have correspondingly greater power.)
Simply not true. In a democracy, every vote counts, even if you lose. Not only that, but the actual act of taking part is important.
MEBuckner pretty much covered the points I would have made. The best part about a parliamentary government is that it encourages political responsibility - one group is in power and it’s expected to run the government. No excuses that the other side is obstructing things.
True, but a feature of parliamentary systems is that they encourage formations of smaller parties that can meaningfully hold power by joining coalitions. In a winner takes all presidential system, the median voter theorem suggests that you’d have only two parties, as any third party would simply play spoiler to its ideological cousin.
No, that is proportional representation – as opposed to first-passed-the-post, single-member-district representation, which the UK (originator of the parliamentary system) still uses, and which the U.S. (originator of the separation-of-powers system) also uses.
A parliamentary system is one in which the executive is essentially chosen by and accountable to the legislature. The UK, as noted, invented this.
A presidential system or separation-of-powers system is one in which the legislature and executive are separately elected and each has an electoral mandate independent of the other. The U.S. invented this; its value as a bulwark against “tyranny” is defended in The Federalist Papers.
The problem I have with our parliamentary system is twofold; our proportional representation is flawed because of the concentration of population in one province (Ontario), and our senate is not elected and useful.
I’d say one of the features of a parliamentary system is Question Period. Any member of the Opposition can question the Government as to what it’s doing. Woe is the member of the Government–even the Prime Minister–who cannot answer a question adequately. Of course, there is press coverage of Question Period, so we’ll all know who goofed and how in parliament today.
Another feature would be that if the majority of members of the Commons lose confidence in the Government, then down it comes, and we have an election. Of course, if the Government’s party commands a majority of seats in the Commons; well, we’re stuck, unless enough of them are willing to vote against their own party. But a system that allows for governments that can lose power on a vote of non-confidence is far better, IMHO, than a system where the people are constitutionally forced to wait a set period of time before an election can be held.
Another feature: the ability of the head of state to dissolve the government at any time and order elections. This is an extraordinary power, and is extremely rare–to the best of my knowledge, it has only been used once in a country deriving its political system from the British parliamentary model: Australia in 1975. But it does mean that if the people are to the point where they are ready to take drastic measures to get rid of an unpopular government, order can be restored by giving the people what they want: the chance to elect another government.
I was just coming in here to mention this. I think that it’s incredibly important that the Opposition can call out the Government on any topic they choose.
- Separation of powers
- Reserve powers
- Question time or Questions Without Notice.
There are plenty of Presidents who’d have been absolutely entralling when speaking unscripted from the dispatch box, and several who would have melted, and hence would never have been seen as a candidate for even ministerial office as a parliamentarian.
That’s not true though. It depends on the size of the democracy. The larger the voting pool, the less likely it is that any one vote will affect the outcome of the election, especially in a first past the post system, where it doesn’t matter if a candidate gets 1 vote more than his opponent or 1 million.
For instance, in my state’s gubernatorial election last year, the winning candidate won by 344,614 votes. My vote against him really did nothing. He would have won if I had voted for him or didn’t vote at all. But that’s also true for any one of the voters who voted for him. If any one of them voted against him, or didn’t vote, he still would have won the election.
Voting only really counts if there’s a small enough number of voters who are closely divided. If your group of 10 is deciding whether to get pizza or Chinese food for lunch, your vote counts. In most modern electoral districts, not as much.
The Governor-General’s dismissal in 1975 of a government that still had the confidence of the lower house was in fact the second time the event had occurred in Australia. In 1932, the Governor of NSW, Sir Philip Game, similarly dismissed the government of the NSW Premier, Jack Lang, and appointed the NSW Opposition Leader, Bertram Stevens, as Premier, with a view to calling an immediate general election: link
Not only can, but I understand that doing so is their function in government.
The Question Period is an important feature, but on the other hand it’s largely political theatre. The answers are not always entirely illuminating as the politicians skate around the answers they cannot or do not want to answer.
As Cunctator points out, technically speaking what happened is that the GG dismissed the government and chose a new Prime Minister who promptly asked for a dissolution of Parliament. There was at the time a persistent deadlock between the House of Representatives and Senate, the Prime Minister (in control of the House) didn’t want to call a House election for fear of losing his majority, but as the Australian Senate is elected and considered in most regards the equal to the House, it wasn’t known if they had the power to deny supply to the government. Having an elected Senate can change the political culture of a country in unexpected ways.