The British parliment seems racous and confrontational while our senate/congress appears so sterile. It seems like alot of time the most important business of the U.S. congress happens when very few members are present. You see rantings and ravings on C-span to an empty house. Why is that.
My opinion is that it is due to the country (England, that is.) being more mature.
It’s the same in Canada or any other parliamentary democracy I’m sure. There is a governing party and an opposition party whose job it is to oppose. The opposition scores its points during question period where rhetoric makes the news. Election dates aren’t fixed and if the governing party doesn’t hold a majority of the parliamentary seats, a vigourous opposition can bring the ruling party down. This can’t really happen in the U.S. (more’s the pity) as election days are as regular as clockwork.
The main function of a parliament in the Westminster system is to choose a Prime Minister. And as long as the Prime Minister has the support of a majority in the lower house of parliament, the Prime Minister is in complete control of the government, including legislation, since in general that gets drafted in executive departments to be formally enacted by the parliament.
Of course, there are controls:
(1) the cabinet, which as in the US is a committee of ministers. While they are all appointed by the PM, they may have an independent power base, and some will have ambitions to become PM in the future. So cabinet won’t always be a bunch of yes men and women.
(2) the party caucus, i.e., a meeting of the party’s members of parliament. Depending on the party rules, this may be the body that actually elects the PM; and a PM who loses control of a majority of the caucus may as well resign, even if the party rules do not require a resignation.
(3) question time in parliament, where the PM and other ministers face questions on their administration from MPs, including the leader of the opposition. While they can be evasive in their answers, too much evasion weakens their hold on public opinion. (In the US context, imagine President Bush and his cabinet colleagues facing an hour of questions in public from Senator Kerry and other leaders of the Democrats).
(4) regular elections, where the voters exercise their coice of who will be PM be voting for an MP from the appropriate party.
The (mostly) parliamentary insults hurled by former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating
A selection:
“I am not like the Leader of the Opposition. I did not slither out of the Cabinet room like a mangy maggot…”
“Shut up! Sit down and shut up, you pig!”
“You boxhead you wouldn’t know. You are flat out counting past ten.”
“The Leader of the Opposition is more to be pitied than despised, the poor old thing.” “The Liberal Party ought to put him down like a faithful dog because he is of no use to it and of no use to the nation.”
“I was implying that the Honorable Member for Wentworth was like a lizard on a rock - alive, but looking dead.”
“Those opposite could not operate a tart shop”
“Honorable Members opposite squeal like stuck pigs”
“…small time punk stuff coming from a punk Opposition.”
“The animals on the other side”
Parliament has never been the same since he left. It’s still lively though 
I suspect you’re judging the UK parliament by what you see on TV. This would usually be PM’s question time. In the unlikely event that you saw any footage from the Australian parliament, it too would almost certainly be from Question Time. Everyone turns up for it.
But quite often there will only be a half a dozen (out of about 150) members present for the actual business of debate. Even on really important legislation. In the event that there’s a vote (or someone gets grumpy and calls for quorum) the bells ring and everyone comes out of their offices where they are doing other work and pops down to vote.
So the emptiness factor is almost certainly just a biased sample issue. The executive doesn’t sit in the US Congress, so there’s no Question Time. I suspect most of the confrontational factor is down to the same thing. Perhaps some is tradition. I doubt Scott Plaid’s explanation and proffer Taiwan as a counterexample.
Parliament is mostly empty, most of the time.
A couple of clarifications - the cabinet is a committee of ministers, BUT unlike the US, those ministers all got elected as MPs. Voters have no direct vote on who will be PM, since he is simply the leader of the party in power. If he doesn’t happen to be a candidate in your riding, you never get to vote for him (I know you basically said that - I just wanted to make it clear).
I’m suspicious of item 2, but I don’t have cites. Does any parliamentary democracy really use the party caucus to choose the leader? I’m pretty sure that’s never happened in Canada - there is normally a leadership convention where the party as a whole (not just MPs - the party organization) chooses the new party leader. The specific methods vary somewhat from party to party and convention to convention (sometimes all party members get a vote, sometimes delegates get sent who then vote, etc.). Caucus might get involved to choose an interim leader if the leader resigned prior to a leadership convention.
And the cabinet are MPs in their own right which means that they are beholden to their constituency parties and their electorate
In a subset of parliamentary democracies (not including Britain and probably also not including those that model themselves closely on Britain)
- the leader of the parliamentary party,
- the leader (president) of the party, and
- the prime minister if the party is in government/the presumptive candidate for PM in the next elections
are separate positions, where 1. is chosen by the MPs, 2. by a vote of party members or a congress of members’ delegates, and 3. by some combination.
jocularjason writes:
> It seems like alot of time the most important business of the U.S. congress
> happens when very few members are present. You see rantings and ravings on
> C-span to an empty house. Why is that.
The speeches you see given by senators and representatives are to a mostly empty house because they are not intended to persuade any other member of that house. They are given for the record. Before the appearance of C-Span, they were basically given so that they could be published in The Congressional Record. Now they are also given so that viewers watch them on C-Span. The real decisions in Congress have nothing to do with the public speeches. They are made in private meeting in backrooms. (No real decisions are made in the televised committee meetings on C-Span either.) The speeches generally show you nothing about how most people will vote on a bill. Wait for an actual vote to be done. If it is anywhere near close, nearly all the members of the house will show up at that point.
Please get out of your mind the idea that C-Span has anything to do with real power in Congress. It’s only for show. Decisions are made elsewhere and even who will be voting for which bill will be well known before the actual vote.
Generally, with the major parties in Australia, at the federal and at the state level, the lader is chosen by the party caucus.
There have been two cases in recent history where the Australian PM has been dumped by the party caucus. In 1991, Bob Hawke was voted out in Paul Keating’s challenge in the Labor Party caucus. In 1971, John Gorton was voted out, after a tied vote in the Liberal Party caucus where he cast the deciding vote against himself, and was replaced by Billy McMahon.
Regarding Canada:
However, to expand on this, fixed-term limits are no longer the rule in every province.
Ministers do not have to be MPs. Unelected senators have beenmade ministers.
Should be: fixed-term limits are in two provinces. :smack:
It’s normally the case in France, though the leader/president of the party has sometimes been prime minister. The leader of the parliamentary party can’t be MP, since ministers aren’t allowed to be MPs (they must resign if they are).
I meant : the leader of the parliamentary party can’t be Prime Minister :smack: