I was wondering about non-US democracies the other day and I have two basic questions.
Are other democracies basically two party systems like the US?
Do other countries have virtually all of their politicians elected by the people but then us some sort of in-direct method of electing the president/prime minister/ect. like the electoral college?
Just wondering.
Thanks
In my case, Uruguay, there are three mayor political parties, two “traditional” ones, present since the begining of the country (more or less conservative, right leaning but with strong liberal trends) plus a third party that began in the late 60s (left leanning, but with conservative/anachronich streaks). That last party has grown quite strongly and now represents around 1/2 of the electorate, the traditional parties split the other half.
There´s a fourth party of moderate affiliation that is of social-democrat ideology.
A lovely bunch, isn´t it?; if the US had a similar political map the Great Debates forum would be a madhouse. 
As of now elections are coming in November, there are internal elections in the parties, when one or more candidates are selected.
Then the general elections are compulsory, there are two rounds of voting (balotage, sp?) after the first only two candidates remain for the final election.
All in all the system works quite well, there´s plenty of options to choose from, and in the end the balotage system guaratees that the elected president had the approval of the mayority of the population.
Most parliamentary systems have several parties, but once elected, a few of them will have to form a coalition to be the majority, and the rest will be the opposition. So the results are similar to having two major parties.
In all parliamentary systems, the prime minister is chosen by the majority in parliament. (The electoral college was a compromise between this idea and direct election of the executive.)
An important difference in US politics is that the head of state and head of government are the same person. This is very unusual. Most democracies have a head of state, such as a President or monarch, who is seperate from the head of government, such as a prime minister. Usually the head of government’s job is mostly ceremonial, but he may have some powers.
In the UK, individual Members of Parliament (MPs) are elected directly. The country is geographically divided into constituencies, each representing a recognisable area, and also IIRC approx 60000 people. Anybody can stand for election in a single constituency, as a member of a party or as an independent. The person with the highest number of votes becomes the MP for that constituency - also described as ‘winning a seat’.
In most elections, there is an outright majority for one party - in receent history either Labour or Conservative. In that case, the leader of that party becomes Prime Minister and forms a Government. Where there is no clear majority, ie where no single party has over 50% of the seats in parliament, it’s possible that a coalition will be formed. Essentially, this is an agreemenet between two or more parties to work as one, in order to function as a government. This is common in some countries, but rare in the UK.
One of the major criticisms of the present system is that it preserves a two-party system: Labour and the Conservatives each have proportionately more seats than their total number of votes would suggest. The third party is the Liberal Democrats, and they tend to get somewhere around 20-25% support, but the voting system ignores that. Or maybe I’m indicating my own bias 
…
The US is somewhat unusual in having a system dominated by two parties. The reason for this is probably related to the structure of the government. All major elections in the US are “first past the post” systems, where by the winner is one who gets the most votes. Third parties have little incentive to participate, because if you don’t finish first, your time was wasted. Other countries, such as the UK and France, use a “proportional representation” system whereby the seats in the legislature are divided up among the registered parties according to the proportion of the votes received. This means that a party can be successful (ie win seats in the legislature) even if they recieve only a small fraction of the vote.
No we don’t!!! Apart from in elections to the European parliament.
New Zealand has two main parties and several smaller parties. In recent years the major parties havent been able to win enough seats in parliament to have a majority so they form tempory alliances with the smaller parties in order to get a bill passed in parliament.
Having watched our parliament sit im disgusted by there behaviour, full of ad hominem arguements with the mp’s acting like children. Politics they call it.
(MMP system its called)
But like all democracies its fake system. You never get what you think your voting for since the parties tell you what they think they want you to hear. If they want to do something they know the public wont support they do it mind-term knowing the voters will have forgotten by next election.
Close to elections nothing tangible gets done except some arse licking minor policies.
Throw in the fact the majority are largely happy in NZ its the minorities whom scream the loudest getting most of the benifits in order to buy there votes for the next elections.
At the moment NZ is going through a massive racial debate, though the topic will bore people so i wont go into it.
We had elections just yesterday in Greece.
-In Greece, we vote for members of parliament directly.
-The voting law is not proportional. That is, the winning party takes at least half of the seats. In yesterday’s elections, the leading party (ND) had 45% of the votes and got 167 seats, while the second party (PASOK) got about 40% and 115 seats.
-A party needs 3% or more to be represented in the parliament.
-Ministers are assigned by the winning party leader(who automatically becomes Prime Minister) from the pool of the elected MPs. It is possibe however for the PM to choose one or two Ministers from outside the party (non elected).
-Traditionaly (for the last 30 years) the battle has been between the two political parties, ND and PASOK.
I am not quite sure about elections in the USA, but one BIG difference I can spot is that the spotlight falls on only one person from each party, for example Bush or Kerry.
In Greece, this tactic would be a surefire way to lose the elections! I believe this is because there were some very promising party leaders in the past, but their ministers were incompetent. The parties have to convince that every single person in their ranks is capable.
A bit on the mechanics of NZ’s MMP system.
It’s a compromise between using a purely electorate/constituency system and a proportional representation system. When you vote, you get two votes; one for your electorate and a ‘party’ vote. The electorate seats are decided normally, and are allocated 69 seats. Another 51 seats are allocated via the party vote for a total of 120 seats. A set mathematical formula is used to covert the percentages into seats. Each political party then allocated party seats according to their pre-select party list; where politicians are listed in order of preference. It’s here where you get interesting people, such as minority races.
Note that this party list is completely separate from the electorate roll.
Where is gets interesting is that the only way to get a seat is to either get 5% of the party vote, or to get an electorate seat. Due to the formula, if you get an electorate seat, the percentage threshold drops significantly. In 1999 the Green Party got 5.2% of the party vote (which by itself would have translated into a coupel of seats) it also got a electorate seat too, which meant it ended up with a total of 7 seats in parlament (or 5.8% of the total 120 seats).
In another bizarre example, Jim Anderton’s Progressive Coalition (yes, that’s it’s listed name) only scored a single electorate seat and 1.7% of the party vote; it ended up with 2 seats in parliament.
In the midst of all that mess, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had to roll for initiative too. I can just hear the woops of delight as the opposition rolls a natural 20. 
Up until 1996, New Zealand general elections were first past the post, with the candidate for each electorate who received a plurality of votes being declared the winner. There were 99 electorates, each one nominally representing 30,000 voters. (The actual number of electorates depended then, and still does but using a different calculation, on the population of the South Island.)
There were also 4 Maori electorates, also elected by FPP.
While FPP was used, there were two main parties, and for a good deal of the time only two parties, third parties not being able to win a seat unless there was a very charismatic candidate able to get the support within one electorate.
Then we changed to mixed memeber proportional (MMP) in which 62 electorates still return MPs from FPP elections, and about 60 MPs are elected in proportions to the votes their party received. There is a threshold of 5% of valid votes cast, below which a party will only receive a position if it also has an electorate MP elected.
Since then there are more parties than you can poke a stick at, and at the moment there are MPs from 7 parties plus one independent (who actually got chucked out of her party for misbehaving).
See this site http://www.ps.parliament.govt.nz/schools/texts/members.shtml
I think this is a misunderstanding about presidential elections in the US. Presidential electrions are entirely seperate from legislative ones, and it’s perfectly commonplace for a person to vote for a senator from one party, and a president from another (for example.)
Australia
Federal Parliament consists of two houses: the House of Representatives (Lower House) and the Senate (Upper House). Election to the HoR is by preferential voting. Voters list candidates in order of preference: 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. If no candidate achieves an absolute majority on first preferences, then second perferences (then third, if still no majority is achieved) are counted. This system allows minority parties considerable influence: while they may not receive many first preference votes, distribution of their supporters’ second preferences can be vital to an election.
The party holding a majority in the HoR forms Government. The leader of this party is Prime Minister. The PM is a Member of Parliament like any other; the nation as a whole does not directly vote someone into this office. The PM is Head of Government but NOT Head of State. The minority party in the HoR is known as the Opposition.
The Lower House is dominated by two major political parties: Labor (note the absense of a “u”) and Liberal. The Libs currently hold Government in coalition with the National Party. Labor may be vaguely characterised as “left” and Liberal as “right”, although both have numerous factions within the party with widely differing points of view. Note that positions held by the nominally “right”/conservative Liberal party would be viewed as “leftist” in American terms.
Election to the Senate is by proportional voting. Distribution of voting districts is uneven: each Australian state regardless of population has 10 Senators (the Territories have two). The Senate is dominated by the major parties above, but the proportional system of voting has allowed minor parties to grab the balance of power. Democracts, Greens and independents have considerable influence in the Senate: at present, their cooperation is vital to the passage of Government legislation opposed by Federal Labor.
The Senate was contrived as a house “of the states” (hence 10 Senators from each), but it is drawn-up along strict party lines, like the Lower House.
Australia’s Head of State is the Queen of Australia, Queen Elizabeth II. Her power is exercised in her Australian representative, the Governor-General. However, the Queen has no real power in Australia: the G-G’s powers are mostly ceremonial and the “reserve powers” are exercised only on “advice” of Government (“advice” meaning direction.)
Executive power is vested in Cabinet, made up of the Ministers of Government and the PM.
I might add that while we don’t directly elect the PM, at election time there’s no doubt in any voters’ mind who they are indirectly voting for as Head of Government. For example, I may not care for my local Federal Member of Parliament, but I will nonetheless vote for him because I want a particular candidate as the leader of this nation.
Just to clarify, it is only the the second preferences of defeated candidates (those who receive the least first preference votes in any given round) whose preferences are distributed.
Broadly but not completely true. In the 1974 crisis, the G-G did not do what he did on the advice of government. He sacked the Prime Minister, who certainly had not advised that this be done. The extent of the reserve powers, and the “conventions” that supposedly apply are vague. The latter are largely unenforceable.
Wow! Facinating replies so far.
Does any country directly elect the national leader?
France does but the situation there is unusual because both the president and prime minister are part of the executive. The president is elected and the prime minister is appointed by the president. This link gives more details:-
Just FYI, in the United States, “first past the post” is called “winner takes all.”
UK elections are all “first-past-the-post”. All PMs in the UK are elected in a district. There is no proportionality. Likewise, unlike in party-dominated systems, there is no legal requirement nor practice that forces the US president to be of the same party that dominates the US Congress. US Presidential elections are completely independent of US legislative elections. It is actually legal in the USA to vote for individual people for office rather than be forced to vote for a party. In the USA, I can legally vote for three different “parties” for federal office: One for president, one for representative, and one for senator. Each can be of a different party. Government in the USA never needs to be “formed”. It is determined by election outcome.
As has been mentioned herein, Greece is not proportional, either. The plurality vote party gets parliamentary majority. Canada is “first-past-the-post” as well.
Actually, I believe the U.S. is quite unusual in only having two strong parties.
Canada has four parties at a federal level, three national parties (Liberal, Conservative, and New Democratic) and one party (Bloc Quebecois) dedicated solely to getting Quebec out of the country. But then when you look at each province’s politics, they may have a different mix of parties. Some provinces have the Liberal-Conservative-NDP trifecta, but in Saskatchewan they have the Liberals, NDP, and the Saskatchewan Party. In Quebec there is essentially no Conservative OR NDP party; their provincial politics are fought amongst Liberals, Parti Quebecois, and Action Democratique. Of course there’s other little parties like the Green Party or the Libertarian Party, but like in the US they have about as much chance of being elected as does Bugs Bunny.
Canada is similar to the United Kingdom in structure; each riding (the equivalent of a U.S. House district) votes directly for its representative, and the person with the most votes wins, whether “most” was 80% or 25%. The party that wins the most ridings, of which there are 301 last time I checked, forms the government, and their leader is the Prime Minister. So we do not directly elect the Prime Minister, but of course you know who te leaders are before the election; most people vote for the potential PM and the party, not for the local candidate.
In theory, the Prime Minister is the head of government, while Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada, is the head of state, represented in Canada by the governor-general. In actual fact, the Queen has no real power; the Prime Minister runs the country. It’s theoretically possible for the governor-general to suddenly up and decide to thwart the wishes of the Prime Minister and Parliament, but quite frankly, if they did, it would be an outrage and they’d probably start moving towards getting rid of the monarchy.
The USA has one, only one, and no more than one “national” office in the sense that everybody across the USA votes for that office–President. All other offices are “local” in the sense that voters within a certain state (Senators) or district (Representatives) vote for that office. Thus, the “spotlight” of the national conglomerate corporate media falls on the one office guaranteed to get national interest. State and district elections are covered by local press. The party of the president does not determine which party dominates the legislature.
Only temporarily “unusual”. The UK, for more than 200 years, has more often than not had only two strong parties. We did not invent the “two-party system”. We merely adapted it from Britain.