However, in some parliamentary elections (for example, the UK), one doesn’t actually vote for the government at all. Every general election consists of 650 elections, each one for a specific constituency. Each one of those sends a single person to the House of Commons as an MP for that constituency. A government is made up by the party with the most MPs and a stable government is only made if that party gets enough MPs to fill half the house (meaning fellow party members would have to rebel if a vote of no confidence is to happen).
So, in theory, using the UK as an example, the only people that voted for the current Prime Minister (David Cameron) are those that voted Conservative in the constituency of Witney.
Quite so, amanset, although I would argue that all parliamentary systems work on that basis; I don’t know of a parliamentary system where the Prime Minister is directly elected.
I know Israel experimented with direct election of the PM in the 1990s but it was abandoned as being a failure.
Almost all the parliamentary democracies work that way. The federal and provincial governments in Canada do (IIRC, there was something about 2-member ridings in BC).
Very often, the races in Canada are 3-way. But then, you can think of them as Tea Party in reverse. The NDP are more radically socialist than the Liberals, so the people committed to that party’s point of view would rather vote for an NDP than compromise and vote Liberal, even though it gives an edge to the Conservatives; unlike the Tea Party types who use the primaries for knocking off “too liberal” candidates.
In fact, in most provincial politics you have seen the same polarizing effect as south of the border. The provinces used to be generally Liberal vs. COnservative, the “founding factions” of the country. The NDP has slow gained on the Liberals, one step forward, half step back. In some provinces, the Liberals are irrelevant now. In others, the NDP toe-holds are in their infancy.
Perhaps another factor is that national media contribute to leadership-style politics. The original concept of ridings, like congressional districts, was that the people of an area elected someone known and trusted by them, to represent them in the legislative body. Today, particularly in urban ridings, the divisions are very arbitrary, and so compact, that a typical voter may not be aware which riding they are in and on voting day, they go by party and leader news and vote for some anonymous name that has the desired party designation. In this situation, demagogic posturing on issues wins more votes than calm and reasoned discussion. Going door to door has limited value when your competition is half an hour on the nightly news or 24 hours on the “news” channel of choice. This is where the more organized, bigger party systems might have value in persuading a community - but in modern anonymous non-ethnic urban settings, even that sort of organization is of limited value.
A primary election is an election in which the parties’ nominees for a position are chosen. And “supporter” and “member” are both incorrect. You are simply “registered” with a party, and has been pointed out in this thread, registration is not universal in the United States. I have never registered with a party, but I have voted in many primary elections. In the states I have voted in, you don’t register. You simply ask for the ballot of the party whose primary you want to vote in. The only restriction is that you may not ask for more than one ballot.
I don’t know why you say this as if it is a point of contrast between Canada and the United States. There’s no difference.
What, in Canada it’s reported that American voters are beholden to vote for one party or the other?
Er… you seem to be very confused. I was AGREEING with your assertion, just providing the numbers. Where did I take issue with it?
Now, as to whether everyone who does not belong to a political party is non partisan, that is obviously something of an oversimplification. Many people who are not members of a political party will nonetheless vote for one party over and over; all the three major parties have some degree of baseline support that exceeds their membership. My parents voted Liberal for 40 years but never once belonged to the Liberal Party. The number of absolutely rock-solid Conservative supporters in Alberta exceeds the entire national membership of the Conservative Party of Canada. Clearly, some people are really, really partisan.
You seem to be very confused indeed; were you of the impression that Americans do not have the right to vote for whichever candidate they choose?
You’ve never in your life heard of the fact that the United States of America holds free elections with secret ballots where people can choose the candidate they want? Really?
I mean, there’s “Not hearing that” and then there’s “making insane assumptions.” It takes all of fifteen seconds to find out what a primary is. I have never actually HEARD on the news that, in Australia, people who violate the mandatory voting law are arrested and thrown into a bear cage to be torn apart and eaten, but I feel safe in believing it is probably not the case.
Ohio doesn’t have *pre-*registration, but asking for a party’s ballot does officially register you with that party. It doesn’t impact most people much, though. I think candidates in partisan primaries can only be nominated by voters in their party.
You’re also supposed to sign a loyalty oath to your new party if you request a different party’s ballot, but I think that’s sporadically enforced. Jennifer Brunner required it statewide, but I don’t know what Jon Husted is doing.
In New Hampshire, there are more people registered as Independent or Undeclared (I think the terms are interchangeable - people tend to say Independent, but paperwork says Undeclared) than there are registered as Democrats or Republicans. In some towns there are more Independents than Democrats and Republicans combined.
When someone registered as Independent goes to the primaries, the clerk asks you which ballot you want. After you vote, you wait in another line to get your registration switched back to Independent.
Didn’t one of those parties call it itself something along the lines of “Conservative Reform Alliance Party” for awhile, or is that just an urban legend?
IIRC that proposal lasted about 2 days, until someone with more brains than a Reform Party member figured out the catch.
Actually I think it was “Conservative Reform Alliance” and then people pointed out that names were often followed by “Party” as in NDP for New Democratic Party.
It should be borne in mind that the Alliance ended up not being an alliance at all; the Progressive Conservative party declined to merge with them. But they kind of had to stick with the moniker.
Today’s Conservative Party of Canada is, in fact, the finalized reunification of the party, with a much better and simpler name.
The timeline Northern Piper provides overstates the turnover at the top of the Canadian political heap a bit; in truth, until 2011 it was always the Liberals and one form or another of the Conservative Party on top. Since Confederation, the Conservatives have grown and merged and reformed a number of times but it’s always been basically the same political force. The Conservative Party was one of Canada’s founding parties. During the Depression, Westerners became disillusioned with it; Western alienation from central Canada’s power center is a common theme in Canadian politics. The Conservatives bled support into third party protest groups until finally in 1942, one of them, the Progressive Party, merged with the Conservative Party to become the Progressive Conservative Party. (The Progressive leader actually became leader of the new party.)
That party lasted until 1993. The PCs had won majorities in 1984 and 1988 under Brian Mulroney, who had expanded the party even further by reaching out to soft nationalists in Quebec with the promise of Quebec-friendly Constitutional reform. After the failure of Constitutional amendment efforts, the PC party exploded in 1993 and blew up into three factions; the Western-based Reform Party, the remnants of the PC party, and the Bloc Quebecois, a new alliance of former Quebec PCs (led by former PC lieutenant Lucien Bouchard) and harder nationalists.
The split of the PC party essentially guaranteed a succession of Liberal electoral victories. In 2000 the Reform Party tried to get the PC party to merge with it under the Alliance banner; that failed, but they stuck with the Alliance name out of PR necessity, to be perfectly honest. In 2003, however, the Reform/Alliance party and PCs finally agreed to merge and went back to the party’s original name. It shuld be noted that at the PROVINCIAL level it’s still usually called the Progressive Conservative Party; provincial parties are separate organizations in the Conservative and Liberal movements.
So until 2011, every government or opposition was either the Liberal Party OR or of the various continuous incarnations of the Conservative Party.
But as of 2011, the New Democratic Party is the Official Opposition. That’s a first in Canadian history; the NDP is a legitimately third party, not an offshoot of the Liberals or Tories. It took a great deal of ineptitude on the part of their opponents to pull this off; the Liberals have been amazingly inept the last few years and the Bloc Quebecois utterly imploded, paving the way for massive NDP gains as the opposition votes coalesced around the NDP. The jury is still out as to whether the NDP can avoid being relegated back to third party status in the next election.
At the provincial level things are a bit more fluid.
The original name of the Canadian Alliance was the “Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance.” Shortly after it was formed, some folks pointed out that if you added “Party”, the acronym was “CCRAP”. The party changed its name to “Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance” right away, but it was generally just called the “Canadian Alliance.”
In the Canadian context, no. In the 19th century, Reformers was a term used for those who wanted to move towards greater democratic institutions, particularly representation by population, since Canada East was heavily over-represented in the colonial Parliament. The modern Reformers wanted to call on those principles, because they felt that Central Canada was over-represented in the federal government, to the detriment of the West. In that context, calling on historical precedents could be seen as both conservative, and reforming the federal government.
In fact, the Social Credit party emerged in the west during the depression and contributed to the 4-way split of the fedreal parliament, including their Quebec “Creditiste” incarnation; a splinter smaller conservative faction to balance the NDP, the more-radical-than-the-Liberals left party.
In fact, the Social Credit slowly dwindled over the years, until the 1979 election when the Creditiste wen from 12 to 5 seats, thus losing official party status. Joe Clark as a bare minority only need their vote or the NDP’s to stay in power, but for some reason the Creditiste committed suicide that election and disappeared from the landscape.
Again, in the days before mass media dominated elections, parties centered around a charismatic leader like Tommy Douglas for the pre-NDP, or those exploiting a regional dissatisfaction in the case or Social Credit against the Ontario economic domination by business interests. Being a minority party with an agenda is a double-edged sword. It gets you votes from people who are dissatisfied with government for that reason - but when confronted with real life politics, the need to actually produce policies through compromise, then they are seen as another part of the problem instead of the solution by those who voted for them.