To those who have lived in countries that have a parliament vs congress/senate, what are the pros and cons of each system and which do you feel is the better? Would a parliamentarian system get the US out of its current quagmire or would it still be as partisan as it is now?
The partisanship is a by-product of the first past the post voting system as much as the form of government. The UK is a parliamentary system and the partisanship is just as bad over here.
Looking around the world, the pros seem to be one system broadly works and the other not so much.
We have a PM. Our country is just as partisan, just as polarized, just as politically gridlocked, just as corporately corrupted. The citizens have exactly the same problems trying to get their leaders to do their bidding. Yes, our democracy seems just as broken.
It’s true we have a third party, but to little real benefit, though there is certainly potential if unrealized.
Of course the government can be put out at any time by a vote of non confidence, which seems a benefit, but can get costly with repeated election calls substantially creating a similar government. No term limits means if you get a good one it can pass eight years, but, on the down side, get a bad one and they are hard to get rid of. Also, minority governments- yuck!
There’s certainly partisanship, but “just as broken” is over the top. There’s certainly corruption, but the Duffy and other Senate scandals are personal corruption, not a systemic undermining of the system by rampant corporatism. There are advantages and disadvantages to both forms of government, but a parliamentary system can often get more things done with less gridlock because there isn’t the same clear-cut and potentially partisan separation between the executive and legislative branches, and fewer intentional roadblocks within the legislative system itself.
That said, I think much of the present US partisanship has historical and cultural origins and has more to do with the influence of money and corporate interests in politics, and on certain issues the influence of religious interests, than with the structure of government. There is nothing on the national stage in Canada to compare with far-right extremists like Carson, Cruz, Walker, Paul, and indeed most of the other current Republican standard-bearers who are so disconnected from reality, or Trump who seems to inhabit an entirely different planet. There is no Tea Party, no anti-government extremists claiming – as Grover Norquist once did – that “government should be small enough that you can drown it in the bathtub.” There isn’t anywhere near the same rampant distrust of government. On the major issues that are so contentious in America, Canada long ago enacted universal health care, passed sensible gun control, legalized abortion, adopted a strong social safety net, and embraced a rehabilitative approach to crime, with consequent societal benefits.
It’s true that Harper represents a throwback to something more like US Republicanism, but it’s significant that political realities have limited what he’s been able to attempt, and he’s currently getting his ass kicked on the campaign trail. If he gets back in at all, there’s no way it’s a majority government.
Well, the benefit right now is that it’s pretty much a three-way race, with said third party not just in the political mainstream, but having a real shot at forming the next government. And throughout the last Parliament this previously marginal third party has been the voice of the official Opposition. That’s no small thing.
Right, but they still have to go to the polls at least every five years. Not hard to get rid of even a majority government if it becomes unpopular. We’re in the process of getting rid of one right now! And minority governments serve only with the support of the Opposition.
Minority governments often result in wishy-washy compromises or nothing at all. In that respect they tend to resemble the US Congress, and for similar reasons. Some think that minority governments can be beneficial because whatever they do pass has to have broad bipartisan support.
The United States legalized abortion before Canada did.
Perhaps more to the point, you are describing “contentious issues” as systemic failures, which they are not. Shouldn’t a healthy society have contentious issues? Canada has in my lifetime TWICE teetered on the brink of the political breakup of the entire country, and the current election campaign suggests we have a few contentious issues of our own. That is not a sign of the failure of the political process, it’s a sign that we have a political process that allows people to voice different opinions.
That you happen to feel Canada’s solutions to some issues are better than America’s is of course statistically likely, since you are Canadian and so are likely to prefer the Canadian way of doing things. People from other countries would no doubt feel the same way you do about us. That would not constitute a good argument that the Canadian political system is broken or flawed.
I may be biased but I prefer parliamentarism over US-style presidentialism. If there’s a bone of contention in which the Executive and the Legislature disagree, then there are mechanisms in place that allow for one side or the other to ‘win’ and the issue to be…if not settled, then a decision be taken. In other words, the government falls, or Parliament is dissolved, and the matter is placed in the hands of the people.
Britain ceased to be a two-party state years ago, although the only possibilities for power-wielding right now are the Tories and Labour thanks to the implosion of the Lib Dems. But beyond the current snapshot of party power, the party system in the UK is in considerable flux.
Partisanship and party loyalty are criticisms often laid at the Westminster system - the yah-boo politics of the Commons and the lobby-fodder of the whip system. But the partisanship is overdone, as there is tons of party co-operation outside Wednesday’s PMQs, and the committee systems of both Houses excel in providing relatively nonpartisan scrutiny of policy. And the whip system is decaying too - the 2005 and 2010 parliaments were among the most rebellious of British democratic history.
Yes, but that was by judicial decree, not by legislative act or plebiscite (not to mention that it’s constantly being chipped away). How did Canada legalize it?
So there’s no abortion debate in the US today?
That’s just one of those statements that is factually correct while conveying no meaningful information whatsoever. If we’re comparing abortion laws let’s do it fairly.
When the Supreme Court of Canada overturned abortion laws in 1988, they were overturned completely and absolutely. Abortion has been unconditionally permitted ever since and has entirely fallen off the mainstream political radar. Not just permitted, but fully covered under public health care. No one except a few religious extremists even talks about it any more, and even extremists like Harper have made it clear that politically it’s strictly off the table. The issue is settled. It’s over.
I don’t need to tell you what the situation is in the US. Roe v. Wade preceded the Canadian ruling by 15 years, but it was far more limited and launched a national debate that’s been raging ever since. Late-term abortions are illegal and most states have enacted every possible obstacle to early-term abortions or driven out abortion clinics entirely, and conservative politicians are falling all over themselves to try to outdo each other on how adamantly they’re opposed to any sort of abortion, and how the evil Planned Parenthood organization must be stamped out and driven off the face of the earth.
Saying the US “has legal abortion” is a lot like saying that the US “has universal health care” because if you stagger into an ER with a knife in your back they’re obliged to treat you.
We didn’t, we just don’t have any criminal laws dealing with it. Abortion is basically covered by the Canadian Health Act as a medical procedure.
But the question isn’t U.S. vs. Canada, it’s prime minister vs. president.
Look at Italy. Right now there’s something like 19 different political parties represented in their parliament, which pretty effectively eliminates any chance of ever having anything but a coalition. As a result, the country has had to form a new government almost every year.
France has had six prime ministers since 1997 (during the same time the U.S. has had only three Presidents) and one of them, Jean-Paul Raffarin, had to stand for election three times in three years.
They sound pretty quagmire-y to me.
But they don’t seem to have hijacked by either the 1% or some lunatic right wing movement that thinks invasion is sensible policy.
That addendum wasn’t there when I replied to what was initially a one-liner, so let me respond to it now.
I believe my comments are more than just preference or alleged ideological bias on my part. I’m saying that while parliamentary systems have some advantages, the US system has others, and I’m not expressing a strong preference and I’m asserting that this is not the nature of the problem of partisanship and quagmire expressed in the OP. I’m attributing most of the currently stated US political problems to a recently emergent far-right ideology that by any objective standards is simply not aligned with reason, exacerbated, I believe, by the disproportionate and ever-growing influence of moneyed special interests. I submit as evidence this commentary from Thomas E. Mann, a political analyst from the Brookings Institution, and Norman J. Ornstein, from the indisputably right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, who have written an entire book about this issue. I think I posted it somewhere before but it’s very pertinent here:
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges … Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.
Hence my comment about “far-right extremists like Carson, Cruz, Walker, Paul, and indeed most of the other current Republican standard-bearers who are so disconnected from reality, or Trump who seems to inhabit an entirely different planet”. A parliamentary system isn’t going to fix this. In fact it might even make it worse, because a majority government can pretty much steamroll right over any opposition and do what it wants.
As far as I can tell, the main advantage of the parliamentary system is that the election campaigns aren’t two fucking years long.
I haven’t made a serious study of this, but on the surface, in a parlamentary system, a PM strikes me as being the equivalent of the US Speaker of the House being the chief executive. I guess the US system provides more checks and balances with a separation between the executive and legislative branches.
Well, not exactly. The PM wears two hats, but he is still merely the leader of the largest party. If his party decides to vote against him, it means a new election rather than just a blocked piece of legislation.
Hey, you can’t spend $6.3 billion in an afternoon! 
Not always. It can just mean a new Prime Minister (q.v. Thatcher & Major). It also means that the Prime Minister can retire without forcing a new election (q.v. Wilson & Callaghan).
Judicial decree.
Right, but once again, the underlying facts are crucially important. It was a judicial ruling that overturned the law in toto, no waffling over conditions and exceptions and attempts to define when human life begins. It was followed by an attempt by the Mulroney Conservatives to introduce a new law, which had little support and went nowhere, and that was pretty much the end of the abortion debate in Canada. It’s nowhere on the political radar now, and is pretty much relegated now to religious fundamentalists and a few of Harper’s evangelical backbenchers that Harper himself has to rein in.