Non-US Dopers: does your constitutional system require legislative confirmation for executive positions?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have a government question that is primarily factual, but could verge into political discussion. Since I’m not trying to start a debate, I’m sticking it in IMHO, with its more flexible rules for discussions.

My question is for Non-US Dopers, as set out in the thread title: In your country, do executive positions require approval by the legislative branch, the way it is in the US?

According to this article:

there are approximately 1600 political appointments that an incoming president must fill, and which require Senate confirmation. That’s not counting judges, US attorneys, and marshals. That’s one of the reasons for lengthy presidential transitions: all those jobs to fill.

The time for Senate confirmations has increased steadily over the past 40 years. The average time in Reagan’s administration was 69 days; for Biden’s appointments, it was 192 days. Apparently there have been some positions that have been vacant for years.

That’s not the system I’m used to. In Canada, none of the Cabinet positions need legislative approval. By winning the general elections, the incoming PM gets to appoint whoever he wants to Cabinet, provided they hold a seat in the House of Commons. Essentially, the people are the confirmation process, by electing individual MPs who are then eligible for appointment to the Cabinet.

Deputy minister positions are appointed by Cabinet (I think Assistant DM positions are as well), by an order-in-council. No legislative oversight.

Positions below DM/ADM in the ministries are considered non-partisan, and are filled by the normal employment process, through the Public Service Commission competitions. That means there is significant continuity in the public service, and not 1,600 jobs to be filled every time a new government is elected.

Significant agency appointments (Canada Revenue Agency, etc.) are appointed by Order-in-Council passed by Cabinet.

Net result is that transitions take a couple of weeks.

So, how does it work in your country? Does your country follow the US requirement for legislative confirmation for executive appointments?

2

Is that law or tradition?

Cabinet consists of all ministers, including the Prime Minister. Usually all Cabinet ministers are MPs, who are chosen by the Prime Minister to oversee a government department (also called a [ministry]

3

In a parliamentary system, isn’t the entire executive branch inherently subject to legislative approval? You don’t need a separate approval process because you’ve already selected the PM.

4

In Israel, the Prime Minister presents themselves and their entire cabinet to the Knesset (legislature) for approval in a single vote. If a cabinet member is replaced at some point, the Knesset will vote to confirm the new one individually.

5

In Ireland the Taoiseach (prime minister) is elected by the lower house of the legislature. He then appoints whoever he wants to ministerial positions (but they must be members of one or other house of the legislature). These appointments are not subject to ratification by the legislature, but at any time the legislature can hold a vote of confidence in the government or in any particular minister, and by political convention if the vote is lost the government, or minister, must resign.

In Australia the position is similar except that the Prime Minister is not elected by the legislature but appointed by the Governor-General on the basis of a judgment that they can command the confidence of parliament. Invariably the Governor-General appoints the leader of the party, or coalition of parties, that holds a majority of seats in the lower house.

6

The Canadian model is a good’un and Australia follows it pretty closely.

Appointment to the Australian Federal Cabinet is by the Governor-General on the advice of and as selected by the prime minister and is composed of the senior government ministers. There are currently 23. There is a maximum of 30.

The Governor-General appoints the Ministers (inc Deputies, Juniors and Assistants) on the advice of the PM, including portfolio responsibilities e.g. Tony Burke is Minister for the Arts, Minister for Home Affairs, Minister for Cyber Security, Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs … until Albo decides to expand his roles, reduce his roles or strip them completely.

The Governor-General also appoints the public service secretaries of a department (Defence, Education, Finance, Foreign Affairs and Trade etc.) on the recommendation of the Prime Minister.
The PM recommends an antipodean Gaetz as Attorney General, the GG swears in the antipodean Gaetz.

7

That is indeed a crucial difference between the American presidential and parliamentary systems of appointing the Cabinet. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage of the parliamentary system such as practiced in the UK, Australia, and Canada, is that the appointee to Cabinet has in effect already been vetted by the voters, and in fact much of the time the appointee is not just a Member of Parliament, but often a longstanding senior MP. The disadvantage is that this individual will by definition be a political appointee who may have far less understanding of his department’s responsibilities than the established senior civil servants, leading to the kinds of scenarios parodied in the series Yes, Minister.

The advantage of the American presidential system in this respect is that the president is free to appoint anyone he wants to a Cabinet position, subject only to senate confirmation. This can be an advantage when competent presidents appoint accomplished individuals to the post; Obama appointed many notable individuals from academia and public life. His Secretary of Energy in his second term, for instance, was the nuclear physicist Ernest Moriz, with a stellar resume of accomplishment in both academic and public life. His EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, was equally accomplished.

The disadvantage is that it’s one of the factors that amplifies the tremendous scope of virtually unfettered presidential power, and that’s a huge problem if the president happens to be a malignant demagogue. Right now, we see the president-elect appointing an assortment of extremists, criminals, and raving lunatics to Cabinet positions, with no objective other than ensuring total loyalty and wreaking havoc on established institutions, including their own departments. Some of these lunatics may not be confirmed, but most probably will be.

8

I would say that’s a feature, not a bug. The role of the minister is to provide policy decisions on the issues that come before them, and that doesn’t need specific expertise in a particular area.

I once heard Alan Blakeney being interveiwed on this point by a CBC radio host, and she suggested that a doctor would be a good candidate for Minister of Health. Blakeney responded he would never appoint a doctor to that position, because that would be an inherent conflict. Why should doctors be assumed to know what is best for the health system in the province overall? If a major policy dispute about health care administration came up, and the doctors, the nurses, and the hospitals all took different views on it, he wouldn’t want a doctor being the one to make the decission. He would want a sensible minister, smart on policy issues, to consider the different viewpoints being expressed, who would then make a recommendation to Cabinet, and the Cabinet as a whole would decide.

To put it more bluntly: If Tommy Douglas had a Minister of Health who was a doctor, during the doctors’ strike, would we have got medicare?

9

I don’t agree. What we expect from our government is well-informed, forward-thinking policymaking. There’s no magic formula for achieving that, but surely one of the essential ingredients is a Minister (or Secretary, as the case may be) who listens to expert advice, both from his own department and potentially from external advisers, and intelligently evaluates it with an open mind. There’s no magic formula for selecting such a person, but it’s pretty much a truism that some of the most bizarrely incorrect views on important public issues are held by uninformed morons. We stand a better chance of well-informed policy decisions being made by someone who actually understands the issues rather than someone who doesn’t.

I’m not arguing here for the superiority of the American system of Cabiner appointments, mainly for the reasons I’ve already cited which potentially make it much, much worse than any issues with the parliamentary system. American history is replete with stories of presidents – almost always Republicans – who appoint to Cabinet and other senior executive positions ideologues who hate what their department does and work to dismantle it. I’m just objecting to the “feature, not a bug” characterization.

Because they’re doctors. Health care is what they do, what they’ve been trained for all their lives. We can’t necessarily always have a doctor as head of the health ministry, but there’s a reason that the Chief Medical Officer of Health in Ontario – who advises the legislature on health policy – has always been a physician.

In my opinion, yes. Not all doctors were opposed to public health insurance, and many of those who were were influenced by a tsunami of propaganda from health insurance companies, most of it coming from giant American private health insurers and their Canadian subsidiaries. Even in the US today, Physicians for National Health Care has more than 25,000 members pushing for universal health care.

What kind of doctor do you think Tommy Douglas would have appointed to head his Ministry of Health if it had to be a doctor – one of those gullible insurance-industry lackeys, a free-market ideologue, or a fair-minded policymaker who happened to have an MD?

10

So is mine the only country with a Plum Book of positions the incoming administration can hand out:

As I understand it, Trump wants to make the book much thicker.

11

I am an Indian citizen…here all cabinet positions are the prerogative of the prime minister…and the President has to mandatorily swear in his cabinet picks.

Once the prime minister wins the vote of confidence on the floor of the house (Lok Sabha)…all his ministers are sworn in by the President and no further legislative approval for each candidate is required.

Ministers have to be a member of either the lower House (Lok Sabha) or the upper House (Rajya Sabha)…in case someone not an MP is sworn in…he or she has to get elected to one of the houses within 6 months or he/she will cease to be a minister.

PS: India is a parliamentary democracy…not presidential type as in the USA.

12

In the parliamentary system Ministers are drawn from, and are accountable to, parliament. It’s a standing accountability; there is no need for initial parliamentary ratification of the minister’s appointment because parliament can remove the minister at any time and for any reason that seems good to it.

Because ministers must be drawn from a fairly small pool of parliamentarians, it’s accepted that they won’t necessarily have much technical or professional expertise in the particular subject matter of their ministerial responsibility. And it’s just freakishly good luck if they have outstanding expertise in the area — even if the health minister is a doctor, there’s no reason to think that he’ll be a particularly good doctor; within the health service there will be many, many doctors with more experience, more expertise, greater attainments, more professional standing. You really don’t want a minister who thinks that, because he’s a doctor, he should be the final arbiter of medical issues. That is not the minister’s role.

Plus, in many policy areas, there may be no parliamentarian at all with any relevant professional experience. Parliament may contain no truck drivers or train drivers who can be appointed as transport minister; no officer in the defence forces who can be appointed as defence minister; no builder who can become minister of public works.

So, the thinking is that ministers should have all the professional, technical, etc expertise that is required made available to them. The department should employ people - permanent, non-political public servants - with the appropriate expertise to advise the minister, and should contract in more expertise if and when required. (That the kind of advisory role filled by a Chief Medical Officer, and that’s why the CMO is expected not only to be doctor, but one of relatively high standing.) The Minister’s principal role is to provide leadership and strategic direction, and to make policy decisions that have democratic legitimacy. The skills and aptitudes a minister principally needs are, therefore, those of providing leadership and motivation as the head of a large bureaucracy; of considering and assessing advice offered by people who have better specialist qualifications than he does. Those skills are transferrable from department to department, which is why the person who was Minister for Local Government yesterday may be Minister for Foreign Affairs tomorrow.

13

My country of residence, Luxembourg, has a parliamentary system, which works similarly to others as described above and has similar advantages.

To illustrate using our last national election, from 2023, as an example: The election was held 8 October. The leading party, the CSV (centrist, right-leaning), did not win an outright majority and could not declare a government, so negotiations began to form a coalition. The newly elected members of parliament (which here is called the Chamber of Deputies) were sworn in on 24 October, but beyond an agreement in principle that the new government* would be led by a partnership between the CSV and the second-largest party, the DP (centrist, left-leaning), the coalition discussions were not yet concluded and the previous government continued on a caretaker basis. An agreement was finally reached, and a coalition Cabinet formed, on 15 November (this is unusually long by our standards). The official announcement happened the next day and the new government took over a couple of days later. No particular swearing-in was required; the coalition was created as a matter of agreement between the two parties who would govern jointly. (The Prime Minister does present his Cabinet to the Grand Duke as ceremonial head of state, but it’s purely a formal rubber stamp in our constitutional monarchy.) And the vast majority of the administrative apparatus under the ministerial level (beyond a handful of deputies who came in with the Cabinet) is staffed by “public sector” employees; the terminology is a little complicated but these are essentially service professionals whose tenure is independent of election cycles and who are not appointed on a partisan basis.

*As a note on definitions, I am using “government” in its European parliamentary sense, not in the American sense. For more information, see here. Basically, as mentioned by others, the American model, in which the “Presidential administration” comes in with thousands of appointments to supervise and implement policy, doesn’t apply here. The government sets policy, and the public sector is expected to implement it.

One additional advantage of the Luxembourgish system, not really touched on by anyone above, is that these coalitions are commonly reflected in the makeup of the Cabinet. Other countries with multi-party parliamentary systems are frequently led by governments formed by party coalitions, so that’s not unique here. But the semi-proportional mechanism by which we elect our parliament means it’s very rare for any party to achieve an outright majority, and the government is almost always a coalition. (Compare the UK and how its seat-by-seat FPTP model produced a Labour majority and a purely Labour government.) If you followed my links above, you will have observed that the current Cabinet membership is almost equally balanced between two parties — eight from the CSV, seven from the DP.

This has a naturally tempering effect on the aggressiveness of policy initiatives, as you’d expect. Without an absolute majority, compromise and negotiation is the name of the game. Again, this kind of arrangement does commonly happen in other countries, but in Luxembourg, it’s baked into the system almost as a given. Our political culture, as a consequence, is a mixture of conservatism and progressivism: we tend to move toward change quite slowly, and we do, often, have trouble with nimble adaptation to rapidly changing circumstances; but we’re almost always moving forward, and never, ever moving backward.

Politics here is pretty boring, without the volatility you see in the US. And that’s the way it should be.

14

Quite. A minister is there to act on behalf of a general public that hasn’t the time to weigh up all the issues involved in every possible policy or legislation but does (supposedly) know whose judgement it trusts (however questionable you or I might find that decision).

Think of it as a “power of attorney”: you trust someone to judge the various experts you’d otherwise have to deal with yourself, without just handing everything over to a expert you don’t know. The conventional wisdom in both Westminster and Whitehall is “Experts should be on tap, not on top”.

15

Slight nuance to the UK parliamentary system. The Prime Minister can appoint anyone to cabinet who is either an elected Member of Parliament (ie sits in the Commons), OR a member of the House of Lords, who are not elected. If the PM has someone in mind who sits in neither, they can simply make them a peer of the Lords - as our current PM did recently to appoint his Prisons Minister, and Sunak did to appoint David Cameron as Foreign Secretary. These don’t need to be approved by either House, although anyone appointed as a peer needs to approved by the Lords Appointment Commission - more to make sure they’re not a criminal, rather than appropriate for the job.

16

In South Africa, no, there’s no such requirement.

There are eligibility requirements - ministers need to be members of the National Assembly (or up to 2 out of the whole Cabinet can merely be eligible for it but not actual members) , so the US ability to appoint an entire cabinet of randos can’t happen.

There is a path to pass a Motion of No Confidence in individual ministers or the whole cabinet . But their approval is not required before a minister has been appointed.

17

I should say that one effect of the Westminster way is that it’s easy for a PM to reshuffle ministers, if for any reason someone isn’t performing as expected, or to revamp the government’s collective image (or the PM’s personal image).

It can be a two-edged sword in those terms, though, and can mean that some departments become the kind of backwater/afterthought that are given umpteen changes in their ministerial team in relatively few years.

18

For some of the parliamentary systems discussed, how many positions turn over if a new party wins? I found this list for the UK; is that everyone?

19

Same for Canada, circa 25-30 ministers plus the political staff of the Prime Minister’s Office

20

I think there can also be substantial turnover at the Deputy Minister level in the year following a change in government, but it’s not automatic.