Canada is in similar straits, the majority PM is effectively a dictator for 5 years. I blame numbers.
In the British system, IIRC they have over 600MPs, while Canada has 308. Consider that unless it’s a major sweep, the majority in Canada will be about 160 to 170. Subtract 40 or more cabinet ministers, party whip, and other important posts. Add in deputies and heads of committees and you have over 100 MPs with serious positions dependent on the goodwill of their party. Of the 60 or so remaining backbench members, probably 40 to 50 are sucking up to the party brass in various ways in hope of moving up with the next shuffle or election. That leaves at most 10 or 20 members who truly realize they are dead-ended. A showdown that leads to no confidence means an election, and the party threatens to withhold nomination approval or election funds.
Do the same math for Britain, and your 350-member majority has probably 100 to almost 200 members who know they have no hope in hell of going anywhere. Many probably have “safe seats” and so the threat of an election over an unpopular policy should scare the party more than it does them. Backbench revolts are apparently more common in Britain. So, the British prime minister has a bigger incentive to listen to his party in a majority situation.
(Plus, IIRC from the Thatcher denoument, the members decide the leader in Britain so all the more reason to listen to them, while in Canada it’s a party convention of rank and file.)
Well, Israel has only 120 Knesset members, but since the Prime minister’s party rarely holds much more than a quarter of those, he has to spend most of his time bickering with his own coalition members - so much so that it’s often worth his time to ask the opposition to support legislation. And of course, his coalition members often work with the opposition against him. It’s fun, yet exhausting, to watch.
I premised my assertion on the government having a built-in majority, so obviously things are going to be different if that’s not the case. But minority governments here are now rare and don’t last very long, so for the most part it’s a pretty safe assumption.
Neither the rest of your post nor Malden Capell’s gets around the other issue, which is the ruthless discipline imposed by Irish parties. Backbenchers may huff and puff sometimes (usually to their local media) but when the time comes to vote they can nearly always be counted on to toe the party line. Expulsion from the parliamentary party is the price for doing otherwise and only a very few will ever take that step. The Ministers know it, the civil servants know it and the opposition parties certainly know it.
It’s not the population, it’s the number of backbenchers who have nothing to lose and less reason to toe the party line, and more free time to get together and gripe. It’s a lot easier to get away with threatening to toss out 10 MPs for insubordination than to toss 150.
The British/Canadian system with ridings and first-past-the post elections have that over the Israeli system. With proportional representation, every party with a leader the equivalent of Rush Limbaugh or Ralph Nader (to be even-handed here) could have their handful of members in parliament so there’s never a majority and all government formation is an act in arm-twisting by a dozen special-interest parties. There’s a fine line between the compromise of a minority government and the chaos like we see in Greece today or Israel every day.
The other problem with prop rep, IMHO, is that the members come from a party list; the party list is put together by party brass. So instead of a local MP stumping for your area’s local interests, you have a bunch of ex-student-council-politician types, all sucking up to the central party brass (instead of constituents) in hope of getting higher on the list and being more likely to be guaranteed a seat. The MPs are more likely to be capital-centric and less likely to care about any individual area or constituents.
Right on all points - except for the fact that most Israeli parties hold primaries to set their party lists, although they have no legal obligation to do so. That means that they have to suck up to party members, especially to the movers and shakers who can bring people to the polling booths.
Well I don’t know about Ireland, but in the UK the tension is between backbenchers concerned about their personal opinions and/or the opinions of their constituents, versus a very real concern for what the nation as a whole desires. The Labour Party in particular had a very strong philosophy on this basis in the middle of the century.
The tension revolves on this basis, and MPs will vote based on their conscience or the interests of the country (as described by their party), if they see it that way. Sometimes it comes down to picking the battles.
Ironically, in the UK at least, we are currently at a golden age of Parliamentary rebellions. It makes me chuckle when people complain about the present crop of MPs being mindless lobby-fodder, compared to the so-called ‘giants’ of the 1950s.
Yeah, Ireland’s a very different animal. As I said, conscience votes simply aren’t tolerated here. I spent eight and a half years working in the parliament and believe me, I’ve heard backbenchers give every bad excuse imaginable as to why they’re going to vote the party line even though they had campaigned for their seat on the basis that they would vote the opposite way if elected. Listen to some of the Labour contributions to the April 2012 debate on life-saving abortions if you want to hear a particularly hilarious example of this.
As an aside, even on the rare occasion where they do break the whip, most of the time it’s not about conscience but about local issues (e.g., a government decision to shut down an army barracks in their constituency).