You have to remember that American parties are far broader and have far less discipline than those in parliamentary systems. In part, that’s due to there only being two major parties that need to accommodate a wide range of views. In any case, strict down-the-aisle voting is actually fairly unusual, and generally only happens with especially controversial issues. So with a near-evenly split legislative house, moderates on both sides will have a lot of power to sway policy, but that’s always been true.
Bicameral parliaments are our way of dealing elements of what you call the West Lothian Question. It’s balancing regional and population differences. In the UK this needs to be done in the HoC.
In Australia the Senate was conceived as a “States” house of review in a federal system. If you base electorates on the principle of “one vote, one value”, then the more populous states have the numbers.
In the current parliament of 150 NSW & Vic have a majority (87 seats) and with Queensland there is a 76% majority (115).
The Senate, having equal representation from each state (12) and two from each territory is a mechanism to balance that.
I can’t find it now in the report I cited. I thought it might have been in this report by the Asia Foundation instead but I can’t see it there either. I definitely read it somewhere (and I remember the word “elites” sticking out to me) but I can’t remember where so forget about that point. Nevertheless it seems clear some people (including yourself) had some problems with that Constitution, such as with the BA degree requirement.
That’s interesting. And clearly if you’ve seen it yourself then you know better than I do. Apparently the Pollwatch Foundation backs you up, finding that there was minor vote buying in the 2001 election and more serious vote buying in the 2005 election. But it seems there’s been accusations of vote buying and corruption leveled at all sides (page 2 of one Pollwatch report says that there was vote buying from both pro-charter and anti-charter forces in the 2007 referendum on the new constitution for instance), and it seems pretty unanimous among reports I’ve heard, including from yourself, that Thaksin and his party still retains significant public support, vote-buying or not. The Asia Foundation report I cited above says:
In that context, I can’t see how it can be considered democratic for Thaksin to be ousted in a military coup and for his party and hundreds of his party’s representatives to be barred from participating in any future elections. They did the same things that all sides have been accused of to some extent and they retain widespread public support, but it seems to me worryingly like the party has been shut down more because it posed too much of a threat to its rivals than anything else.
Personally, I hope they toss MMP out. It was one of the (many) reasons we left NZ.
Well, at least the legislature in Bangkok knows how to handle Thai votes! 
The situation is very complicated, and I do not want to get into it here, although Thaksin is basically indistinguishable from Al Capone and good riddance to him. But I do want to say my wife voted in that election with the “awkward positioning of voting booths,” and it was no minor consideration. First, they were not enclosed booths, just a table. In the past, they were turned so no one behind you could see how you were voting, but in that election they were turned so that the election officials had a clear view of how everyone was marking their ballots.
Going back to the original question, Today’s Times is reporting that the new coalition is going to create a hundred new Conservative and Lib-Dem Peers to counteract the Labour predominance in the House of Lords. This is designed to get their proposed legislation through the upper house.
Fair enough. That doesn’t sound like a corrupt decision, and I’ve heard a lot of bad things about Thaksin. But I still wonder how it can considered democratic for a leader and party with widespread support to be ousted in a military coup and the party and all of the top party officials banned from competing in future elections.
I’m quite familiar with Thai politics but am by no means an expert, this could be the subject of an interesting thread if you choose to start one.
The words “republic” and “democracy” are not mutually exclusive as you seem to think. Both US and UK are democracies, US is a republic and UK is a monarchy. UK also happens to be a parliamentary democracy, where whatever party/parties that has a majority in parliament form a government (to put it simple), whereas US is not. In a republic the president can be elected and serve as head of state as in US, France or Germany or the situation can be like in Switzerland where the title is rotated among the members of the Federal council, which, as a whole is considered head of state. He/she/it can have lots of power as in US or France or be mostly ceremonial as in Germany etc etc.
Thaksin’s government was extremely corrupt; he’d violated election laws and was looting the state treasury. (BTW, to ask for details on judicial status of charges against Thaksin is to give more credit to Thai institutions than they deserve, corrupt and incompetent as they are.)
Yes, Thaksin had widespread support. But please recall the very first sentences in my very first post in this thread:
I’m no expert either, but I think I have better knowledge of the “facts on the ground” in rural Thailand than are often depicted by foreign press.
I’ve started one or two recent threads; don’t remember if you participated. Can you start a thread on the matter that interests you? I’ll try to participate.
Whatever the definition is, I think it’s pretty undeniable that being a democratic country entails the will of the people being represented in the political system. I don’t know a great deal about Thai politics, but on a basic level, when a party like Thai Rak Thai that has widespread - perhaps even majority - support in Thailand is barred from participating in any future elections, that seems undemocratic to me. Particularly when a lot of the arguments made against that party seem to be couched in terms of, “only rural people vote for them, and they don’t understand what they’re doing; the highly-educated classes are smarter and should make these decisions for them”, personally I find that kind of rhetoric very sinister.
The party was convicted of illegal operations (e.g. vote buying) and was thus banned, by the appropriate court, under the law.
Whatever the strengths or weaknesses of Thai judiciary may be, your comment seems to completely ignore that the ban was imposed legally, not by some whim.
Let me ask you something, The Great Philosopher: Rightly or wrongly, many of us oppose Thaksin not because of some silly court ruling, but because of the extent and obviousness of his crimes and perfidies. Your comments make me ask this: Are you aware of Thaksin’s criminal nature? (Or do you think it’s just more trumped-up nonsense from the “Bangkok elite”?)
These are characteristics of a strong party system. You can argue that a strong party system is more democratic, because voters can be a little more confident that they know what policies they are voting in favor of.
In our weak party system, we vote for individuals, but our governmental system doesn’t give those individuals to enact policy on their own. So, essentially, we don’t really know what we’re voting for in a specific sense, only in a very general sense.
In systems in which the party is strong, then we can be a little more confident that voting for a member of that party represents a vote for a specific series of policy choices. I argue that this is more democratic, not less.
They’re not barred forever. They were barred for five years, AFTER they or their parties were found guilty of corruption. That is a legal punishment. The five-year bans were not introduced with the coup; other politicians were slapped with them in the past, even democrats.
But we’ll have to agree to disagree when it comes to Thaksin. It’s like having to explain why Hitler was bad (another one who was popularly elected). I find many of your views a gross oversimplification of what is in reality an extremely complex situation. “Class struggle” plays well in the international press, so the reds play it up, but that’s really one very small part. It’s really a struggle for power between two or three elites, each one trying to garner as many followers as possible. And this has also never been a truly democratic country. The military allows only enough democracy as it feels is safe and is always there to step in when they feel their power threatened. By no means is it democracy as practiced in the West. 2006 was only the latest in a long series of coups. You could even say that was Thaksin’s main sin, threatening the power of the military.
I suspect the answer to your question is no, he’s not really aware of Thaksin’s criminal nature. The poster possibly thought I was exaggerating if not outright kidding when I likened Thaksin to Al Capone, but you would know I really wasn’t. Besides looting the Treasury and other general forms of normal corruption for him and his cronies, quite a few of his political and business rivals were found mysteriously deceased during his 5-1/2 years in office. And let’s not forget the thousands killed under his War on Drugs, when police who were ordered to fill their quotas simply settled old scores and shot old rivals as “drug dealers.” How many were killed in that period? 3000, wasn’t it? And precious few of them drug dealers. That sort of activity largely seems to have disappeared.
As an indication of this, I understand an individual US Senator/Congressman’s voting record on the various pieces of legislation is public record. In parliamentary systems, a roll call of individual representatives and their vote isn’t taken, (though of course the party numbers men will know them exactly). Even major Bills can pass “on the voices” without a formal vote being taken.
Just as an aside, the U.S. Congress has voice votes, too, but any one member can demand a recorded vote.
I’ve never expressed my support for Thaksin personally - I’m not affected by Thai politics enough to ‘support’ anyone really. I’m not making a simplified argument about class struggle. I’m aware of some of the accusations of criminality and corruption against Thaksin and the history of coups in the country, and I’ve accepted (in fact I provided a cite for) the significant evidence that Thaksin and his party were corrupt and bought votes.
The only point I’m making is that, from my far-away vantage point, it doesn’t seem fair to label one side ‘democratic’ and the other side ‘anti-democratic’, as septimus did. It seems much more complicated than that. There’s evidence that lots of parties and politicians, including Thaksin’s rivals, have been guilty of corruption. There’s evidence that they bought votes too. The fact that the popular parties representing rural people, Thai Rak Thai and the PPP, were both dissolved by the courts which have been known to come under political pressure, and amid rhetoric about rural people not ‘understanding enough to vote’ for these parties and so on, has a worrying ring to me. Essentially all I’m saying is that the situation is not a clear-cut case of, “Thai Rak Thai, the PPP and their supporters are criminal, anti-democratic monsters; their rivals are the clean, democratic ones” and it doesn’t seem fair to represent it as such.
Individual MPs’ voting records certainly are public in the UK. You can look up any MP on The Public Whip or They Work For You. The latter gives more information about the issues they’ve voted on, the former gives more information about when they’ve rebelled against the whip (I love that terminology. :D)
It’s actually quite rare for an MP to always vote in line with his party. Even Cameron and Clegg have had frequent rebellions and Gordon Brown rebelled once. (The reason there are none listed for the current parliament is that it’s so new there haven’t been any votes yet).
There are also a number of votes where the parties officially don’t tell their members which way to vote and are not allowed to send the party Whip round to persuade them.