How democratic is the UK really?

Factual Questions
1

Whenever one of us colonists post something about how the UK government ment works, it typically comes about that QE2 would be about three steps from doing a Charles I impersonation if she were to withhold her royal assent or used her own discretion when appointing the PM. The reason is given as the British supporting the democracy of the House of Commons. But it seems like the HoC is not a very democratic body.

  1. Leadership chooses who runs for election in the ridings
  2. The PM is the always the leader of the majority party (see #1)
  3. On major issues, the MPs vote along party lines
  4. Anytime within 5 years, the PM (technically the Queen but would she ever refuse the PM’S request) can call for a new election. Strangely enough, almost always when they feel they can best win the election.

It would be like here in the US Pelosi and Boehner choosing the House candidates (no primaries), the Senate and President having no real power and Pelosi (as Speaker) running the country with the only possible change being voting Reublican which is really a vote for Boehner. Oh, and Pelosi can decide when the vote takes place or wait out the 5 years. So is the “democracy” in the UK more of a feeling that they can choose (indirectly) their leader every few years rather than a true democratic systen or is this ignorant American missing something?

2

This is not true. The leadership can try, but constituency parties often have minds of their own. And the leadership is chosen by the MPs and party. And unions, in the case of Labour. And MPs are selected by their constituencies.

Not necessarily true. The PM is the person who can command the confidence of the House. If that’s a coalition of smaller parties, that’s fine.

They’re supposed to but that doesn’t mean that they do. Some MPs have major personal issues.

This is a feature, not a bug. It keeps everyone on their toes. And the Queen doesn’t have to call an election: she can invite someone else to try and form a government. This is only done in the early stages of a parliament.

I hope I’ve shown that you’ve missed a few subtleties.

3

A report by the Economist ranks the UK as the 22nd most democratic country in the world, on 8.15 points. The US is ranked 18th, on 8.22 points. So there’s not a huge difference between the UK and the US in terms of democracy.

And you are indeed misunderstanding the UK’s political structure pretty fundamentally. Our political systems are completely different - the US is a federal, presidential republic, the UK is a unitary state and parliamentary democracy. You can’t really make these comparisons about “it would be like Pelosi running the country…”, it’s comparing apples to oranges.

4

That said, I think there are a number of problems with the UK’s current system, which to their credit the new coalition government is taking steps to fix. Your 4th point will soon be changed, as the new government is introducing 5-year fixed terms. They’re also taking steps towards making the House of Lords an elected body (I think it’s preposterous that it’s not elected at present), and we’ve already taken the role of highest court in the land away from the House of Lords and delegated it to a newly-formed Supreme Court.

But the US has a bunch of problems with its democracy too. The Economist has it lagging behind in electoral process, functioning of government (I think everyone can agree that one can be a problem!) and civil liberties, for instance.

5

Yes, but, the ‘House of Lords’ that acts as a 2nd chamber when considering bills is almost completely different from the ‘House of Lords’ that acted as the highest court of appeal for various jurisdictions within the UK. The latter was made up of professional judges, it’s not like Jeffrey Archer or Melvyn Bragg could just saunter in and take part in a decision on complex appeal whenever they felt like it.

6

How would that work? I was under the impression that the whole “lose a vote of confidence, have to have new elections” thing was pretty fundamental to any parliamentary system.

7

Interesting. I think it’s critical that it’s not elected. To have an elected second chamber would be hugely problematic on a number of grounds. I see two main reasons:

Firstly, the Commons could no longer override the second House, as that too represents the will of the people. I do not want a constitutional crisis every time different parties have majorities.

Secondly, promoting someone to the House of Lords is a useful way of getting rid of political rivals or retiring older ministers so you can promote junior ones. And, of course, it’s a carrot for MPs.

The House of Lords is a revising House, one which is there to apply the weight of experience to legislation. It’s not there to fight the Commons.

8

I apologize for the long response but I think you are making some incorrect assumptions about the US system. Don’t believe that Reps. Pelosi and Boehner aren’t picking the candidates that they want in 90% of the cases.

Just my opinion. I think the primary system adds a bit more transparency to the process (based on my own limited understanding of the UK party system). But only just a bit. From time to time you have a non-party supported candidate blow the establishment person out of the water. But its rare. This year, you have had two candidates go down so far. One was beaten in a primary, the other was beaten in a party convention. You could get a couple of establishment candidates get the smackdown in the primary for different reasons. In PA we had an astounding 16 incumbents (out of 253) get beaten in primaries in 2006. A few more lost in the general.

Here’s the thing about running in the US. Try doing it without the party endorsement. I am talking about Congress, a state legislature, county council, city council or school board.

Take a state house seat. You are a candidate for the XYZ district house seat in PA. You call me up and tell me that you intend to run. My first thought is that I would like to figure out who the heck you are. Have you supported our candidates in the past? Do you have a solid resume? I might call the chairman of your municipal committee to check on you.

Assuming you pass, then I will ask you if you can go out and raise say $25,000 for your campaign. You don’t have a website or access to the party donor list. You need to get on the phone to friends, relatives, business associates and get the money. Tap your own bank account if you have to.

Once you do that and get some literature and a small staff, you start getting out and doing the dog and pony show. Call up committee people and meet with them to tell them why you would be a good candidate. Have town halls. There will be a couple of candidate events to talk to committee members. All the while, the party chairman, the speaker of the state house, the majority leader and the head of the house legislative campaign committee are all telling people who they want as the candidate. And committee people listen.

At the end of that shit is a party convention where they endorse a candidate. If you don’t get the endorsement that night, you are expected to drop out. Maybe you don’t want to. Understand that if a member of the committee wants to openly support you in the primary, they could be asked to resign. Large party donors will be asked to cut you off. If one of your donors depends on government contracts, I wouldn’t expect them to stick with you. You will have to go put together your own volunteer network while the endorsed candidate enjoys party volunteers and money.

Now you have to get on the ballot. The party endorsed candidate has volunteers out getting signatures on their petitions. They will more than likely get far more signatures than are necessary. When you submit your petition, the party will scrutinize every signature and if they see anything wrong, they will challenge your petition in court. Hopefully, you still have enough to stay on the ballot after they knock some of your signatures off.

A week before the primary, every registered voter will get a “sample ballot” showing the endorsed candidates which doesn’t include you. On election day, there will be a party volunteer at the polls telling you why you should vote for the endorsed candidate. Hopefully, you have enough volunteers to staff all the voting places, make phone calls to voters, etc.

More often than not, this is a pretty overwhelming advantage. Sometimes there is an elephant in the room. The 2005 PA legislative pay raise, the incumbent voted for a huge tax increase or had sex with a minor or voted for a war that no one in the district wanted. Sometimes the party chairman supports a candidate that no one really wants. Sometimes the committee is so split that they vote for an open primary. Some years ago, I was sitting in one of these forums and the candidate plainly told us that she wouldn’t drop out of the race if she didn’t get the endorsement. Why? She said that sometimes the party is wrong and she had $100,000 in the bank to prove that we were wrong. Those occurences are rare. Too rare to depend upon the primary system as a rationale for “more democratic”.

9

I don’t know a great deal about the intricacies of how the House of Lords works. But my gut reactions to your points are:

Why not? We have a House of Lords that makes revisions and can be overridden at the moment. I don’t see why electing the Lords who are going to play that role is undemocratic.

Which all strike me as really poor reasons to maintain a legislative body. A chamber full of exiled political rivals and retiring older ministers, which still confers enough perks and power to be considered a ‘carrot’, sounds like a shocking element of a major democracy to me.

Agreed. And we should make those Lords elected. What’s the problem?

10

That’s broadly true, but there was some residual interplay between the two that was undesirable. I seem to remember the Lord Chancellor was both a member of the government and a judge, for instance. I think formally divorcing the judicial and legislative bodies is a good idea, even if they were technically supposed to be independent anyway.

I’m not entirely sure. There’s a big fuss about the plans over here right now, a lot of people are very unhappy about them.

11

Because right now the Commons represent the will of the people. And so can override the Lords who don’t. If the Second Chamber also represents the will of the people, then how can the Commons override it? In the U.S., should the House of Representatives be able to override the Senate?

Think of it as the Roman Senate. A repository of people of merit.

12

Whether they should is up for debate, but as a matter of fact, they do so all the time (and vice versa). In the American system, both houses must agree on the entirety of every bill to be passed. Both houses have the right to amend and revise, and all differences must be settled by negotiation. I don’t quite understand your point about how having an elected House of Lords (or House of The Other Commons, as it were) would cause the will of the people to be ill-represented.

13

To ask how “democratic” a country is, one must first define the term. Is it just following popular whim? Some would say that the checks and balances to an elected government, e.g. a Supreme Court or House of Lords, improves governance and may make it more democratic when the term is given a more liberal definition. (If pure majority rule is the ideal, let me propose a law that everyone whose SSN’s end in the digit 8 or 9 forfeit all their wealth to the other 80% of us. :smiley: )

Thailand (which ranks in the middle of the “Flawed Democracies” in the Economist report to which The Great Philosopher links, though that list is two years old) may be an instructive case.

Right now Bangkok is crippled by armed terrorists asking for elections; elections which “their side” might well win. In many foreign news reports we read that they are “populists” fighting an “elite.” Yet most well-informed Thais understand that the incumbent government is more liberal, and more inclined to “democratic” processes like rural advancement, rural property rights, etc. The terrorists are simply being paid by a heinous billionaire (who looted the Treasury when in power previously), who will also pay them for votes if elections are held. Which side represents “Democracy”?

Frankly I don’t find the U.S.A. all that different. Many Americans voted for Bush out of ignorance, despite that Gore or Kerry would have better served their needs.

14

Nope. Norway, for one, has fixed elections. If a sitting government loses a vote of confidence, someone has to form a new government from the sitting parliament. The last time this happened was in 2000, when Kjell Magne Bondevik’s minority coalition government was forced to step down in favor of a Labo(u)r Party minority government.

15

Well, ya learn something new every day. Thanks, flodnak.

16

Quartz writes:

> Think of it as the Roman Senate. A repository of people of merit.

The Roman Senate was a repostitory of independently wealthy people:

17

The OP is tendentious when he suggests that indirect election of the leader is not a “true” democratic system. It is not the American system with which he is familiar, but that is not the measure. I am sure the OP did not mean to be disparaging, but this is a field in which familiarity bias looms large.

Checks and balances are, of course, a good thing. But it does not follow that if some checks and balances are good, more must be better. What you can get with a parliamentary system that has an upper chamber that is too powerful is paralysis.

It becomes too hard to get legislation through. Real, necessary reform (on contentious issues like tax, migration, etc) becomes impossible, and so all that happens is endless posture-driven tinkering at the margins until the situation becomes catastrophic, followed by a potentially dangerous release of the tectonic political energies that have been building up over time.

And the method of election of the upper chamber (if that is to happen to the House of Lords) is very important. The LibDems are howling for a “fairer” system of election. They complain that the present one is “undemocratic”.

By having members represent individual constituencies, there is phenomenon known as “winner’s bonus”, where the winner’s proportional share of seats in the House of Commons is greater than their share of the primary vote.

That this should be so is obvious. If all seats uniformly voted 51% in favour of the Monster Raving Loony Party (for example) then the MRLP would get 100% of the seats. This is seen by the Lib Dems as “undemocratic”. In truth, however, the numbers never work like that extreme example, and the winner’s bonus is real but not overwhelming.

To my mind, this is a feature and not a bug. It allows for stable government. Most modern two-party dominated countries these days have organised themselves so that the dominant parties only ever get a margin a few points either side of 50%. If that weak majority was translated into seats in a House in a parliamentary system, there would be endless collapses, etc.

You can’t unscramble the egg once you have decided to change the system, and it is too easy to wind up like one of those disfunctional democracies whose well-intentioned but ill-chosen constitutional arrangements make stability impossible and whose goverments are a mish-mash of roiling and squabbling minor parties.

I am not British, so my interest in this is from afar, but for mine, the Lib Dems are being utterly self-serving by promoting the “fairer” proportional representation system they advocate for. That system too typically results in minor parties getting a crashingly disproportionate share of power, by holding the balance of power.

Thus, if Labour and the Tories each get 47 and 48% of the vote, then neither has an outright win, and a party with 5% gets to determine what happens.

That is far more undemocratic (and unstable) than the system which presently obtains.

This is why the LibDems want electoral reform - it is the road to power that they could otherwise only dream about, since they will never get elected in their own right. And why voting for the House of Lords (or whatever the new upper chamber is to be called) has to be considered with great care.

The Australian experience is that very often people vote one way for the Reps and another way for the Senate as a power check. The Reps are elected by seats, so there is almost no minor party representation there, but the Senate by proportional representation. The result has been the dominance of single issue party and minor party balance of power politics in the Senate. Why should some isolated and unrepresentative figure from Tasmania (or the Outer Hebrides, or wherever) get to have a power of veto over the government’s program, as has happened?

Why should that person (or tiny party) get the power to negotiate with the goverment on getting the government’s program through from a position of ridiculous strength amounting to blackmail?

What is or is not “undemocratic” is not necessarily obvious. There is not necessarily a linear scale for these things.

18

If it’s proportional, I don’t see how a single representative could override all of the others. And if Tasmania is one of many, why shouldn’t their will be respected?

19

The same way it does right now. Nothing will change. Except that the Lords will be elected instead of being appointed. I can’t see your problem with this.

And who decides whether someone is a ‘person of merit’ deserving of being in the House of Lords? I’d sure as hell rather it was the public than politicians. You seem to be defending the purpose of the House of Lords without understanding that its purpose makes no difference to whether its members are elected or not.

The fact that the unelected Lord Mandelson was Secretary for Business, Secretary for Universities and the President of the Board of Trade, sitting on 35 out of 43 of our Cabinet committees and acting as the de facto Deputy Prime Minister of Britain, is a disgrace to be frank. A politician who had not been elected by anyone was in charge of bailing out our car companies and pushing for a 3rd runway at Heathrow, championing incredibly controversial issues. That’s not democracy.

20

I don’t want to take the thread into a tangent, but this is a very biased interpretation of the situation in Thailand. Thaksin Shinawatra repeatedly won landslide victories in elections which were deemed free and fair by independent observers. To this day he retains the support of the majority of Thais, and the vast majority of rural Thais, who believe he represents them. He had a 3rd election victory invalidated by the courts because of the “awkward positioning of voting booths”, widely seen as a corrupt decision, and was then ousted in a military coup, whose leaders dissolve his party and banned them from competing in the next elections.

I’d be protesting too to be honest.