The OP posits a simple question: What countries have organizing documents, and freedoms derived therefrom, that are most like those of the US?
As the OP acknowledged, you’d have to be quite the legal scholar to provide any kind of non-anecdotal answer. How many people can say they are familiar with the legal foundations and suite of rights for more than a handful of countries?
I didn’t get impression. I thought he was asking what country is most like what he thinks the US should be like.
That was my impression as well, with the talk of the US having “strayed greatly” from its own constitutional provisions. Unless we know what the OP meant by that, it’s impossible to debate his question.
Yeah, I skipped over that straying part as a non-sequitur, but taking that into account it does seem more likely he meant what Acsenray said.
One thing that’s quite interesting is that, as a general rule, most other western countries don’t (at least as far as I’m aware) bang on at length about their constitutions or what a bunch of people 250 years ago meant when they wrote them.
Australia has a constitutionand it’s really really boring. Important, but boring.
Interestingly, neither the United Kingdom nor New Zealand have anything which someone in the US would recognise as a constitution. They’re managing pretty well for themselves (no Brexit jokes, please - you know the point I’m trying to make.)
That is interesting. I admit I know nothing of what passes for law in those savage lands. I do know that US law is based on the English system, so I’m surprised at the difference.
If we grant that in the US the constitution and Bill of Rights places hard limits on what laws any legislature can pass, thus ensuring certain inalienable rights for the populace, what serves that purpose in the UK and NZ?
In theory, perhaps nothing, in terms of structural components. Sometimes parliamentary systems are described as elected dictatorships. A party that commands a majority in parliament can enact its platform. There is no separation between executive and legislative power, and the courts don’t play as strong a role in drawing lines against governmental authority as they do in the American system.
However, tradition plays a much stronger role. In many European countries the idea of “that’s just not done” plays a very real role in the legislative system, such as what kinds of subject matter can be packed into a single piece of legislation, or what kinds of legislative tricks can be used to push one’s agenda.
I don’t think that for example there could be a single senator who threatens to bring the entire government to a halt and risk the government defaulting on its obligations like we have here.
Also, the legislature in a lot of parliamentary systems has to follow rules set by “neutral” players such as non-political bureaucrats or judges.
Also, if the government goes too far, its own members can cross over and actually force a new election immediately with a confidence vote, which brings down the government.
Other than that there is tradition and public opinion.
And in a lot of ways, what we think of as “hard limits” created by the Bill of Rights is not much different than a set of traditions that we mutually agree to adhere to.
Because when it comes right down to it, a piece of paper and a none-member court without an army has no way of forcing compliance with its rulings. It takes a large degree of mutual agreement to follow the rules for our system to work, and there have been times when that mutual agreement has been broken or has come close to breaking.
See for example Andrew Jackson. Or if there were a President Donald Trump, I’m almost certain a constitutional crisis would soon follow.
The population’s belief in the legitimacy of what their government enacts as laws.
[quote=“Bryan_Ekers, post:16, topic:768483”]
Anyway, if Wikipedia is to be believed, the current list of “liberal democracies” consists of:
[ul][li]the European Union (28 members)[]Norway[]Switzerland[]Japan[]Argentina[]Brazil[]Chile[]South Korea []Taiwan []the United States []India []Canada []Mexico []Israel []South Africa []Australia []New Zealand[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
Canada, New Zealand and Australia are in the list so it’s not all Republics, but France and Portugal are missing (or are they counted as part of “the European Union”? The political organization of the EU and of its constituent members are related but not the same, nor is it the same for each member) but…
I don’t know what does that article mean by “liberal democracies” and suspect there won’t be much of a clear definition in it, but the criteria doesn’t seem particularly evident.
I’m just amused by the debate over what the thread’s Founder’s intent was.
Well, the basics seem to be:
The listed nations (yes, France and Portugal and 26 others are under the European Union entry, I didn’t feel like citing all of them) have these concepts in various flavours and to various degrees and which variety is most “free” depends on arbitrary choices. I could see that to someone who feels the private ownership of guns is among the most (if not the most) important personal freedom, the top countries could be the Czech Republic, Switzerland and the United States (assuming that the rest of the country being reasonably free matters).
The answer is depending on what you mean by “organising documents” and “freedoms”
Many countries have written documents called Constitutions or Basic Laws which set describe the organs of the state, their competence and the structure of said State and the division of powers.
Many countries also have Charters of Rights.
So,the many many countries have a Structure which follows the US.
How they differ in effect, you can (and people have) write whole books on. One major way that many European Style Charters of Rights differ from the US Bill of Rights (and therefore from most COmmon Law Countries) is the fact that while the latter are based on prohibitions; i.e the Government is not allowed to act/do a certain proscribed action, the former are based upon positive rights, i,e the Government has to take steps to achieve a certain goal.
You didn’t need to, but saying “the European Union and its constituent countries” would have made it explicit.
That would have been wrong, though. The European Union is its constituent countries; the EU doesn’t exist as a separate entity in a sense meaningful to this discussion (as far as I can tell) and I think my use of “the European Union (28 members)” makes sufficiently clear that I meant the member countries, even if I didn’t bother to list them.
Anyway, a person accustomed to personal freedom could probably live in reasonable comfort in any of the listed countries (i.e. someone could move from one liberal democracy to another without too much culture shock), if they spoke one of the local languages and weren’t a member of a visible minority that the new country didn’t like for some reason. A white Anglophone, for example, could readily settle anywhere in the so-called Anglosphere without too many problems (the only exception I can offhand think of is if that person really really wants to own lots of guns, in which case the U.S. - and only certain parts of the U.S. - is their best bet).
The difficulty with that list is that the great majority of the countries on it do not operate on one of the bedrock principles of the US Constitution: the strict separation of powers.
Scratch all the parliamentary democracies off the list of countries operating like the US.
Then, another of the founding principles is that the US is completely sovereign and did not have to answer to any outside power. (I believe there was even a Declaration to that effect. 
)
So that crosses all the members of the EU off the list.
That leaves as possibles: Switzerland, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, South Korea, Mexico, and South Africa.
Unless my time studying law at university was completely wasted (and it may well have been), Australia’s government (and NZ’s, too) certainly has three separate and independent branches - the Legislature, the Judiciary and the Executive.
And while Australia and NZ have the Queen as head of state, in reality she has no actual power - she is a figurehead. She can’t order Australia to change its national anthem to Land Down Under by Men At Work, or order New Zealand to change its major export to tea, for example.
Well, if Australia and New Zealand are anything like Canada, the effective executive is the Prime Minister and his/her cabinet officers, generally all of them also members of Parliament, i.e. the legislature. There may be a separation of duties, but not of people.
Australia and New Zealand have separation of powers, certainly, in the sense that they have recognisable executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, with distinct roles for each. But the separation is not as strict as in the US; the executive is dependent on and accountable to the legislature in a way that isn’t true in the US, and the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty means that the legislature can delimit and alter the roles of the other two branches in a way that the US legislature can’t.
But I’d deny that “strict separation” on the US model is a necessary condition for being a liberal democracy.
That makes sense; we all share a similar parliamentary system and that seems to be the case here.
Yes, there are separate institutions, but the key difference is in the US system there cannot be overlap in the membership: a Cabinet secretary in the US system cannot sit in the Congress. In the parliamentary system, that type of overlap in membership is required. That’s a fundamental difference between the two systems.
I agree, but that’s not the question asked by the OP. He’s not asked what are the criteria for a liberal democracy. He’s asked what other countries follow the US constitutional model.
Parliamentary democracies with their overlap between the legislative and executive branches do not follow the US strict separation of powers, and thus appear to me to be outside the OP’s criteria.