US democracy was designed to have checks and balances between the house, senate and presidency. Not to mention procedural tools like filibusters, vetoes and veto overrides, etc that intentionally create conflict, checks/balances and prevent one party rule. What about nations where once any one party gets 51% of the vote, they are given power to do whatever they want so long as it is constitutional (an appointed executive from the party elected and a rubber stamp legislative branch)? Basically once any party gets 51%, they are given free reign to do pretty much whatever with no input from the opposition parties.
What countries operate like this? I heard England does, but I really do not know. What advantages and disadvantages does this system have?
Canada is a country with strong majority governments in a parliamentary system. One advantage of our system is that if there is sufficient political will by the majority government, excessive government spending can be brought under control. Canada was perilously close at one point to not being able to sell government bonds (equivalent to US Treasury bonds). The federal government (Liberals) after decades of deficit spending by governments of both stripes took action to increase taxes and decrease spending. They succeeded in restoring a sound financial position.
More routinely, under this system governments must pass budgets. If the budget doesn’t pass, there has to be an election to resolve the impasse.
I would say that one of the general advantages of this type of parliamentary government is that the government is responsible for its decisions. They can’t point fingers at someone else in the government and blame them for the failure to pass legislation.
The whole idea that gridlock is good just baffles me. If your government is perpetually running deficits, spending more money than it raised by taxation, and makes up the difference by borrowing, why is gridlock a good thing? Gridlock in that case means that the financial position of your government gets steadily worse.
Our government was not really built with as much gridlock as we have today.
Our senate used to be elected by our state legislatures.
Our president used to be elected by electors from each state. The electors were chosen in a manner specified by the legislatures of each state (which usually meant they chose the electors). So the senate and the president were chosen by the legislatures of the several states and the house of representatives were chosen by popular election within their districts. This usually led to much less divided government than we see as a result of popular elections across the board. This meant only congressmen were directly answerable to the voter.
It’s possible for a majority party to try to do “whatever they want”, but in most countries there will be more stumbling blocks than just “is it constitutional”.
For Norway I could think of these hindrances:
It still has to pass in parliament, and there’s no absolute power to coerce members to vote government’s way, so it has to be acceptable to over 50 % of the members.
Large changes require a process that takes time in and of itself and the whole of the executive branch, including the bureaucracy, has quite a bit of inertia, so if you do something big the electorate may be only seeing the cost of change and none of the supposed benefits by the time election is up again. And in Norway, not being a two party kind of democracy, voters changing parties is a lot more common, imagine you didn’t have to switch from Democrats to Republicans to punish the former, but could switch from center-Democrats to left-wing Democrats or center-Republicans.
Even if they can’t force the government to accept input, opposition parties can force the ministers to appear in parliament to defend their activities slowing things down and giving themselves and the government’s actions attention, and even if they have a majority now it would be foolish to not take into account that things might be different in <4 years.
I’ll step outside of democracies and apply this to governments more generally. For a political system to function properly, it requires the involvement of competent people. A society needs competent policymakers and administrators. In a democracy, where people vote for the policymakers, there is the added element of an informed democratic voting base.
A system probably needs to be democratic in order to promote a fair and just society, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be bureaucratic in order to function and provide for the welfare of the masses. Dubai, for example, is technically an absolute monarchy and functions reasonably well by any standard. Conversely, democratic systems can utterly and completely descend into political dysfunction and power vacuums (Germany in the 1920s and 30s).
The same applies to the discussion of one versus two party rule. Assuming there are mechanisms which compel the democracy in question to respond to the demands of public sentiment, you could have a one party system that functions well if you have competent people identifying problems, formulating policies, and using resources effectively. The same could be true of a two-party system. I’d say that the United States has been remarkable stable as a two-party system. It has enabled peaceful and relatively smooth transitions of power, even when the transitions have occurred between ideologically different wings of the government. What has changed is that the voting public is simply not as educated or informed as they once were.
Note that in most parliamentary democracies you don’t have a majority party but rather a parliamentary coalition: one of two major factions succeeds in getting enough minor parties to join them to obtain a majority.
The US as originally founded was supposed to be non-partisan. For instance, the vice-president was originally the second place runner-up for the presidency; a system that turned out would only place rivals in the same cabinet.
I always wondered, back in the old days of the Soviet Union and its “Politburo” they all had to be party members but werent the members still elected and werent they still responsible to the wishes and needs of the citizens in the area they represented?
The Politburo was, by definition, the ruling body of the Communist Party, so no, it was a self-appointing oligarchy.
Nominally, there was a Supreme Soviet which sort of looked like a parliament, but its members would all have been approved beforehand by the party, and there would only be one candidate or list you could vote for (and if you chose to take the ballot paper into a booth to think about it and maybe strike through a name you didn’t approve of, which was officially allowed, you would nevertheless find all sorts of inconveniences happening to you).
Even in that system, though, particularly when it came to local government, there could be some opportunities for people to exert some pressure of their own on candidates. There not being any real choice of candidate, it was still important for local party officials to demonstrate that they’d got everyone out to vote, so , for example, a mother might say that it would so much easier for her to get out to vote if there were a more convenient day care centre for the children nearby, or if the local bus service were more reliable. That, of course, was in the latter days, post-Stalin. Likewise, local, regional and national party leaders in the different constituent parts of the USSR had, to some extent, to respond to and reflect local differences and needs to at least make it look as though the party was trying to appeal to local sentiment; but this was very much within limits and under overall party control (and under Stalin, of course, all bets were off - too much in the way of signs of independent spirit and it was the firing squad for you, hence the way he repeatedly disposed of local leaderships in Leningrad, for example).
In the satellite countries, there was more of a semblance of pseudo-democratic multi-party representation in local councils and national parliaments, but that too was all rigged by prior approval of the Communists. As the East German party boss Ulbricht said in the earliest days of the postwar Soviet occupation “It must appear democratic but everything stays in our hands”. It was the blatant falsity of the local council election results in East Germany in 1989 that started to trigger the open revolt against the system.
I don’t think that allowing the 51% engage in tyranny over the 49% is a good thing. Personally I believe our system allows laws to pass too easily. If 2/3 of the people agree that something is a good idea it probably is actually a good idea. If not then what’s wrong with letting people choose for themselves rather than forcing their whims on the rest of us?
The UK is the country that comes closest to this. Constitutionally speaking, parliament can enact laws to do literally anything; it is not constrained by an entrenched constitution delimiting its powers. Other countries that have inherited the Westminster system typically do have Constitutions that cannot be altered or overridden by a simple majority in Parliament, but the UK does not.
In some ways the UK goes further than this, since it’s possible for a party to hold more than 50% of the seats in the House of Commons even after securing less than 50% of the vote. (Indeed, this is the usual state of affairs.)
It doesn’t follow, though, that the power of the party in government is wholly unconstrained. There are no legal constraints, but there are political constraints. The executive government is dependent on the support of a majority in the House of Commons, and if it introduces a legislative initiative which is repugant to more than a few of the legislators in its own party, it won’t get through Parliament. It isn’t often that measures sponsored by the government fail to get through Parliament, but it does happen. And what happens more often is that the executive considers a measure, but never brings it forward because it recognises that it would be unpopular with, or unacceptable to, the party’s legislators.
The presidential electors elected Washington and maybe John Adams. After that, they were elected by popular vote. Election of senators went on in most states until the early 1900s and I understand that senators mostly just bought their seats (cf. Rod Blagojevich). But the real reason for the gridlock is that one party decided that their best strategy was to guarantee that the government by the other party not function. This strategy was essentially the work of the Newt.
One thing that is not widely understood about the Canadian system is how much power the prime minister actually wields. When an election is held, the PM (and the leaders of the opposition parties) gets to choose who runs in each riding (electoral district) and woe betide a member of his party who has not toed the line on important issues. So when Canada instituted single payer health insurance in 1970 the PM, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, simply proposed it and it was passed, although there were probably amendments. You didn’t have the spectacle of the congress having to bow down before the insurance companies because they paid the bills.
The real problem in the US is not so much the separation of powers but that the parties (and I mean to use the plural here) represent their real constituents–the big money men who pay their bills. A couple years ago I read something from a representative who said that in order to fund his reelection campaign he had to raise $30,000 a week. Each and every week. And if he took a vacation one week, he had to raise $60,000 the following week. This is incompatible with having the best interests of his district of the nation in mind.
The US didn’t invent the filibuster, what they did was limit the means to end them i.e. the basic procedural motions of closure (or cloture or the guillotine or the always good for provoking outrage “I move the speaker be no longer heard”) requiring supermajorities rather than simple majorities.
I like the idea of a mechanism that enables the minority voice to be heard in full voice, but if the filibuster is such an important feature of US democracy why doesn’t the HoR allow it?
BTW, it’s pedantic but instead of “free reign” you really mean free rein.
Why the assumption of a “rubber stamp legislative branch”?
They may be, as Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating described “unrepresentative swill” but the function is a house of review, usually with a different method of appointment, different period of tenure.
Even a landslide win in the lowerhouse does not guarantee a workable majority in the upper house. IMHO the parliamentary system works better when the legislative and are in an slightly uneasy equilibrium.
For example in 2004 Howard won his fourth term with an increased majority in the HoR but it was the winning control of the Senate that laid the seeds of it’s inelegant and unproductive spiral to a well-earned defeat.
All the constitutional monarchiesfor starters
The key principle (if not always practice) is that “You have won a majority, now get on and do it” and furthermore if you don’t get on with governing or if we don’t like how you are governing we’ll kick you out …. not necessarily giving you a full term for your troubles. And that option can be invoked in sometimes as less than 2 hours. ‘Tis a wonderful thing for concentrating the political mind.
We don’t have rampant executive government riding roughshod over the populace without having the USA’s self-lauded check & balances to prevent that very thing happening.
We don’t have the brinkmanship and dysfunction those checks & balances enable.
The US have this mantra about the evil of unnecessary government regulation interfering in conducting good business but not on regulations interfering in the business of conducting good governance.
No, that makes 2/3rd of the people who vote in agreement with the decision.
Whether it’s a good idea might not become apparent for some time, and it might be unconscionably bad for the 1/3rd agin it, or the 40% who didn’t vote.
A plebiscite calling for a 2/3rd reduction in personal taxation might gather 2/3rds support. Doesn’t necessarily make for a good idea.
It’s an exaggeration to say that conservatives are derailing government simply to enhance their own power (though means and ends always feedback). The fundamental problem is that the liberal/progressive side is committed to an agenda that alienates a significant portion of the public; and the Republicans have made political hay by representing that portion of the public. Republicans don’t block legislation for the sake of blocking legislation- they block it because it represents “progress” in a direction that a large number of people simply don’t want to go. Indeed it’s disingenuous to call that gridlock, as if almost everyone (only apparently most of those don’t care enough to vote) wanted the proposed legislation, with only a few despicable troglodytes (who somehow produce Republican majorities) impeding the process.
Just adding a gloss to this: the assumption is that members of the governing party elected on its manifesto for the preceding General Election will vote for any measure proposed in that manifesto, and for each year’s Budget, though they may well have different ideas about implementation (don’t forget that the legislation is prepared by professional civil servants who will have tried to make sense of the manifesto, in the light of experience in managing different areas of government policy). Likewise, though of course the opposition will vote against at the key votes, there won’t be much in the way of procedural tricks they can use to delay or stop such a measure, nor would they be likely to do so (in case it’s done to them when they’re in government).
The House of Lords, likewise, has the convention that they won’t stop such a measure, but they do act to refer revisions and amendments back to the Commons where there might be potential for unforeseen consequences.
The real arguments come when governments have to deal with some wholly new situation or come up with something not in the manifesto.
The GOP has refused to pass clarifying legislation to improve ACA because they want it to fail.
More Presidential nominations have been blocked under Obama than under all previous Presidents combined.
When the Democrats gained control of the Senate in 2007, filibusters soared far beyond record-breaking levels.
When the GOP took control of the House in 2011, they went five years without passing a Budget Resolution.
The GOP House has spent more time investigating Benghazi than was ever spent investigating 9/11 or the blunders during the Adventure In Iraq.
As one example of GOP pettiness, the bipartisan Shaheen-Portman Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act was delayed by a full year when GOP Senators insisted that unrelated anti-environment amendments be included.
TL;DR: I think it’s time you found a new dictionary to look up “gridlock.”
