And then there’s the Republic of Korea (aka South Korea). There is both a President and a Prime Minister here, each of whom has quite a lot of power.
I don’t think this is an accurate description. There still are separate legislative and excecutive branches in a parliamentary system - it’s just that there is an overlapping membership between them. But Tony Blair, M.P., has different powers from Tony Blair, P.M.
As M.P., Blair is one member of the Commons, and has one vote and all the rights of a member. He can directly decide on legislation.
As P.M., Blair is the working head of the executive branch. He sets the general throust of government policy, and with his Cabinet colleagues, he decides what legisative and other policies the government of the day will pursue. But since the Queen no longer has any direct legislative powers, other than the Royal Assent to bills, P.M. Blair cannot change any laws. He has to persuade Parliament to do that.
The difference between the two roles is well illustrated by a recent example in Canada. Stephen Harper, the leader of the Conservative Party, campaigned on abolishing the federal registry for long-guns. The Conservatives elected the largest block of seats and formed the government, but they do not have a majority, only a minority government.
This has posed a problem for the Prime Minister and his pledge to abolish the registry. All three of the Opposition parties support the registry, more or less. If Prime Minister Harper introduced a bill to abolish the long-gun registry, it’s likely that the three Opposition parties would likely vote together to defeat the repeal bill. That would be embarassing for the Government, and might even be seen as a defeat on a confidence motion, triggering elections.
So as the leader of the legislative branch, Prime Minister Harper can’t get the law establishing the long-gun registry abolished. Stymied? Not quite. The law that established the long-gun registry gave the executive branch the power to issue amnesties for failure to comply with the terms of the registry. That power was probably intended to allow “turn in your sawed off shotgun without charges” campaigns, which happen from time to time. However, the Government has recently issued a general amnesty for anyone who possesses a long-gun, had it registered, and allowed the registration to lapse. They argue that in the long run, when they have the votes, they will abolish the registry, but in the mean-time, using an executive power, this is what they can do to uphold their campaign promise.
Not necessarily. There can be minority governments, such as the current federal government in Canada. The Conservatives have the single largest number of seats, but not a majority. Nor do they have any coalition agreement with any of the other parties. They survive for the moment because none of the Opposition parties are ready to bring down the government (yet).
There are exceptions to this principle. Israel, for example, elects the Prime Minister directly.
Not anymore. They changed it back, so now the PM is appointed by the Knesset again.
The Dominican Republic does, for whatever that’s worth, and as far as I know the rest of Latin America functions in that same manner.
In Spain the President does not need to represent a majority. If enough time and votes pass without one being elected, the King can appoint one.
There’s Autonomous Regions where, if there have been 3 rounds of voting without a local president being elected, the nominee of the party that got most votes (not most seats) is President.
The majority needed to be elected President is less than the majority needed for most laws, so if you are in the “majority” but not in the “absolute majority” you still need to deal with your opponents.
Personally I like it when our governments are in that grey area: when they’re in the absolute majority they tend to go into steamroller mode; when they’ve got to deal, everybody’s opinions are heard.
Hm? Ah, yes, we don’t call him Prime Minister, but yeah, his functions are more similar to Blair’s than Bush’s.
When we’ve had Republics, the Prez was both PM and Head of State.
You have a King, and a President? Is there also a PM? Or does Spain not have a parliamentary government?
As is well known, this often happens in the U.S. too, sometimes with unhappy results, but other times necessary and positive, as was the case with Abraham Lincoln.
Also worth noting that the Salisbury (pronouned Saul’s-berry) convention dictates that the House of Lords cannot vote against any measure contained in a government’s manifesto. This is, however, a longstanding precedent and not an actual rule, although recently there are mutterings that it might be codified into legislation, following HoL blocking of some Identity Card legislation. Plus, of course, the PM can ultimately control the House of Lords by appointing any number of his own peers to vote the way he wishes (which is how Llloyd George pushed his social reform measures through the Lords in 1911).
It seems to be a bit confusing , and may have something to do with mistranslation. For instance I found this from a joint press conference of the British and Spanish prime-ministers :-
*Spanish Prime Minister:
Well, I’ve been President of the Government for 45 days now. Obviously I have had many contacts in the theatre of the European Union, but I can assure you that from my talks I have more candidates than EU member countries…
*
So, as prime-minister, he is president of the government but not of the country. I think!
After a bit more digging I have found this, from an official Spanish website
Under the law, the official result of a general election in Spain is made public five days after the vote. This allows sufficient time for recounts and disputed results, if necessary. After the members have been sworn in the king meets with the party leaders and asks one of them – usually the leader of the largest party – to form a government in Spain, which must then be ratified by parliament. The leader of the party of government becomes the president of Spain and has his official residence in the Moncloa Palace in Madrid.
But this person is also called the prime-minister. Very confusing.
There is no “President of Spain”. The head of the government is called the “President of the Government” (Presidente del gobierno). It’s an alternative term for Prime Minister. In Italy (& Portugal 
) it’s President of the Council (of Ministers).
I assume this confusion arises from the title Presidente del Gobierno being shortened in translation to President. A president presides over something - in this case the Cabinet, and the person chairing a Cabinet is usually called Prime Minister.
Right – in Spain, “Presidente del Gobierno” is shortened in everyday parlance to “Presidente” w/o further clarification.
As for the straight presidentialist a-la-USA system, the bigglest block of followers of that model are the Spanish- and Portugese- speaking republics of Latin America, which were founded shortly after US independence but at a time when parliamentary republics were at a low ebb.
Actually, this is one of the few places where the British monarch does have a bit of residual power. It’s the Crown which creates new peers, and the King or Queen will agree to do so to break a Commons/Lords deadlock, at the P.M.'s request – but has the right, by quite recent (constitutionally speaking) precedent, to put what conditions he or she feels appropriate on the agreement to do so. (It’s one of the rare British checks and balances – protecting against a dictatorial-wannabe P.M.)
Actually, the Crown has never actually created peers to make a majority for the P.M.'s party – the mere threat of doing so elicited agreements from groups of Peers to absent themselves, abstain, vote the Government line, etc., to give the measure a majority. William IV first used it in 1832 to pass the Reform Bill, I believe it was threatened at the time of the Corn Laws, and George V famously used it in 1911 to break the budget impasse. I believe George VI threatened it during the Labor government (1949-51) but never, so far as I know, actually went to the table with it.
Well to be precise, George V agreed to a request of the Liberal government. Some very conservative members of Lords would simply not approve any budget the Liberals put forward. The Liberals knew they had the support of the country, so they arranged for the 1910 election as a mandate on the budget. The understanding was that if the Liberals won in 1910, and Lords still refused to budge, then the King would appoint sufficient peers to change Lords to a Liberal majority.
Face with this, sufficent numbers of Lords voted for the budget and also to eliminate Lords’ ability to veto legislation (I think).
The English system is quite old (parliaments go back to the 1300s) and has evolved without a formal, written constitution. The modern English “constitution” works pretty well, but the system the Americans experienced in the 1770s was flawed. That was the reason that the US Constitution departed from the English model; the idea was to keep the best parts and fix the bad ones.
Of course, no form of government is perfect. Churchill (to paraphrase) remarked that democracy was a hideous form of government, but the best one we’ve discovered so far.
More modern democracies have tried to implement a more representative model, using ideas like proportional representation and so forth. Wikipedia has tons about this, in case you’re interested. Do they work better than the US model? I don’t know.
I suspect that the “Founding Fathers” (our buzzword for the guys who came up with the US Constitution) did not want “majority rule” or even “proportional rule”. Madison wrote about the “tyranny of the majority”, and certainly the Tea Tax and other stupid stuff in the American Revolution came from a majority of British MPs.
My gut feeling is that proportional governments (Germany and Israel come to mind immediately) need to have both a PM and a President. The PM provides leadership and the President provides continuity and ceremonial functions. The key is predictability. If it works, don’t fix it.
Also to be noted the founding fathers feared the will of the majority. They felt the masses were far too unedcuated to decide their own futures. Therefore at first the US Senate was not elected. The two members from each state were appointed by the legislatures of the state. Eventually more and more of the states thru the years allowed their own citizen to directly elect the senators of that state.
The Senate is unusual as that it is not a representitive body of the people. For instance California has 33 million people and two Senators while Wyoming has less than 600,000 people and and equal number of Senators to California. This accounts for the vast influence of mining and agriculture in congress.
There was always a debate over what role the president would play. Right from the beginning some politicians believed the President could do anything unless expressly forbidden by the Constitutions. Others believed the opposite. After the Civil War had Johnson been impeached AND removed from office it pretty much would have reduced the role of President permenently to a cerimonial level.
The Senate was designed to represent the interests of the states as equal members of the union, while the House was designed to represent the people. That’s why Senators were originally appointed by state legislatures instead of being directly elected. Madison and Hamilton speak at length about the reasons for designing the Congress the way they did in the Federalist Papers. They’re definitely worth a read.
The idea that the US government is not representative, etc. is not new, though it has gained momentum since the early 1900s. In truth, the government has evolved into a more centralized entity with power flowing towards the central (Federal) side. The earliest anti-Federalists (soon to become the Democrats) feared this, although they did not specifically point out the Senate as proof.
The Jacksonian Democrats balanced “states’ rights” with further necessary power of the central government to make “internal improvements” by helping roadbuilding, railroading, inland navigation, and displacement of native Americans.
Over the 2 centuries, individual rights versus the efficacy of centralized government power has gone back and forth. We needed the power of the central government to eliminate slavery,fund railroads, and build a world-power economy. In return we may or may not have lost individual freedoms.
That’s the nature of a government that can evolve to meet the needs and attitudes of succeeding generations.
By the way, the Senate was not designed to be representative of the people; that was the role of the House of Representatives. The Senate was meant to balance power between large and small states and to be a more senior advisory council balancing the power of the executive and the judiciary.
Senators were originally picked by each state’s legislature. The legislature could use any method to do this, although most of them based it on popular elections within the state. This was only changed in the early 1900s.
I think that the respondent’s proposition that mining and agriculture hold power because of Senators from Wyoming is extreme. Better to say that business of all types can spend money and time to influence the government.
It’s also extreme to say that an impeachment of Andrew Johnson would have produced a ceremonial presidency. Johnson’s situation was based on an interpretation of the Constitution that even at the time was hotly debated. In short, the Senate maintained that, because of its advisory power, it had the sole right to dismiss cabinet members.
Remember, the Senate must approve cabinet members appointed by the President. The Constitution says nothing about removing them. The Senate overstepped its authority in the Johnson case.
Even overstepping its authority, the Senate could not lawfully take away specific powers given to the executive by the Constitution. Those powers are much more than ceremonial.