As a loyal American, I have to note that Der Trihs’s comment has more than a touch of pungency in this regard. In this country, the Head of Government and the Head of State are the same person, viz, presently George W. Bush.
Which makes it very difficult, in the eyes of those influenced by sound bites, to make the clear distinction between “I love and support my country” and “I oppose the idiotic policies of the present Administration.” (And to keep this from being partisan, flash back to the Clinton years, or even better the New Deal, and contemplate a Republican in the same bind.)
Someone can be a loyal citizen of Damanistan, respect its King/Queen/Grand Knyaz/Shahanshah or figurehead President, and be dead set against what the present Prime Minister/Premier/Reichskanzler/Grand Vizier and his coterie of melted-brain ‘advisors’ use in place of a coherent foreign and domestic policy. That’s not so easy when “Our Chief Executive” is also the idjit whose short-sighted wastrel and arguably criminal policies are destroying the country. (And that doesn’t have to be GWB – it’s true for any HoS/HoG where the two offices are combined.) – Plus, if the PM/Premier decides it’s a crisis which requires his steady hand at the wheel and cancels elections, the “figurehead” Queen/President/Emperor/Grand Exalted Pooh-Bah can fire his ass. Doesn’t work that way in America.
The republic referendum in Australia in 1999 offered a “minimal change” model. The new President (to replace the existing monarch / Governor-General) would have had essentially the same powers as those currently exercised by the Governor-General. The President would have been appointed by Parliament. This model thus gave the power of appointment of the President to the politicians themselves, and not to the voters via a direct vote. The result was that the referendum split the pro-republic forces: many who wanted a republic, but did not want the particular model on offer, voted against the referendum. When you added their NO votes to those who wanted to retain the monarchy, the referendum was defeated in every state and territory except the ACT.
That’s debatable. Arguably, George Bush is the Head of State and Nancy Pelosi is the Head of Government. The President has the powers traditionally reserved to the Monarch - he embodies the nation in diplomatic law, he’s head of the armed forces, and he executes the law. But he doesn’t have the power to enact laws or to collect taxes that a Prime Minister traditionally has.
Where is that the case? I don’t know any parliamenary system where a prime minister has those powers. Because they are typically elected by parliament they can expect to have a majority behind them and many of their proposals are accepted. However they have no real power to enact any law on their own.
“Executing the law” on the other hand is pretty much the prototypical duty of a parliamentary Head of Government.
Prime ministers cannot enact laws; their Parliaments can. Granted that they are leaders of the majority parties and can generally get a law passed, the distinction needs t be made. Nancy Pelosi can no more cause a law to be enforced than Bricker can – almost precisely: each has rights as a citizen under certain circumstances, and no political authority for the execution of laws otherwise. Bush is, famously, the Unitary Executive – and hence, Head of Government as well as Head of State.
How could this be argued? Nancy Pelosi controls (to an extent) when bills are debated/voted on in the lower of the two houses of one of three branches of the federal government. How do you get “Head of Government” from that?
As Polycarp already posted, I didn’t mean that the Prime Minister or the Speaker of the House have powers as individuals to enact laws. But they are both the chosen representative of the majority party in the legislature (leaving the House of Lords and the Senate aside).
British justice is carried out by Her Majesty’s Courts Service not the Prime Minister’s Courts Service. The judges are representatives of the Monarch not Parliament. Another example would be the power of pardon. The President and the Queen can pardon people; the Prime Minister and the Speaker of the House cannot.
Of course in the actuality of the modern United Kingdom, Her Majesty is pretty much obligated to accept the “advice” of Parliament on most issues of how she carries out her duties of this nature. But it is still done in her name.
Americans tend to think of the term “government” in a different way then it’s thought of in other democratic countries. That’s why when we here that “the government fell” in some European country, our first reaction is to think the country collapsed into anarchy. But for many people, the government is just the political group that currently is in charge - they may be replaced by a different political group but that doesn’t mean the country itself changed; it’s just its government that changed.
Even here in America we tend to think of the primary duty of a government as being the power to make laws. The Constitution is the supreme law and nobody is above the law and we are a nation of laws and all that. But the President has no official power to make a law and is subject to the law. Even George Bush, whose critics claim ignores the law, in actuality always frames his position as being obedient to the law - he just states that he interprets the law differently than other people do but he will obey and enforce it as he understands it.
So if you can understand the idea that the main power of a government is the control of the law, then Congress runs the government. And leaving aside the Senate (and that guy in the Oval Office), we had Democrats making the laws from 1954 to 1994, the Republicans making laws from 1994 to 2006, and the Democrats back making laws since last year.
Ok, that explains most of our misunderstanding. If you really count the legislative as part of the government, then it’s more understandable why you consider Pelosi a leading figure in the Government although her role is drastically different from that of a Prime Minister and non-Americans wouldn’t call that a “Head of Government.”
The United States has a major city devoted to churning out celebrities so the gossip rags and half the television channels can stay in business. We find this to be quite profitable and we can even export it around the world but there is only so much to go around.
Besides, people are more interested in things which happen in their country or in their own culture. So if some Euro country wants to retain their royalty and nobility so they can read about the drunken princess fucking the entire national soccer team, well, do you really want to take that away from them? What would the house wives do?
No cite at this hour, but in some GQ discussions of the British political system, I’ve read opinions that the monarchy does sometimes serve an actual political function: When a general election produces no clear mandate for a new government, the sovereign can on her own authority appoint a caretaker PM to govern until a compromise for a coalition government can be worked out. Thus there is no serious interruption of political leadership. And this applies with equal force to the governor-general representing the soveriegn in any Commonwealth country with a parliamentary system, such as Canada or Australia.
Actually, it’s a difference in terminology. In the U.S., we use the word “government” to mean what in most countries would be the “state” (a word whose usage in American political discourse is complicated by the fact that we have a federal system in which the constituent units, or autonomous provinces, are for complex historical reasons denominated as “states”); i.e., the whole body of public institutions, legislative, executive, judicial and military, all of which endures in some form from one election to the next. Whereas most countries – especially those with parliamentary systems – use the word “government” to mean what in the U.S. would be termed the “administration,” i.e., the executive leadership in power at the moment.
Severus, it’s interesting that you mention the example of Germany in this regard, because it took the Germans two tries to move from a monarchy to a successful republican system, headed by a President.
The first, failed, attempt was the Weimar Republic, established after World War I. That constitution continued the model of a parliamentary system, with the substitution of a popularly elected President with broad powers, similar to those possessed by the Emperor under the Imperial Constitution. The President was sometimes called the “Ersatzkaiser” (“substitute emperor”). That choice of a strong President, popularly elected, with considerable powers to choose the Chancellor, is considered to have been one of the causes of the instability of the Weimar Republic, paving the way for Hitler to seize power by constitutional means. What had been intended as extraordinary powers for the President were used on a regular basis, subverting the Reichstag as the source of power.
To the credit of President Hindenburg, he appears to have resisted appointing Hitler as Chancellor as long as possible, but some of his other choices for Chancellor were dubious: Von Papen was a committed anti-democrat, General von Schleicher an authoritiarian who encouraged President Hindenburg to rule as much as possible using his constitutional powers, and to subvert the Reichstag. Büring may not have been committed to undermining the Reichstag, but he certainly advised Hindenburg to use his extraorinary presidential powers as much as possible. See the wiki article on von Hindenburg.
That’s why, after World War II, the drafters of the Basic Law of the German Federal Republic went to pains to reduce the powers of the President. In addition to a method of indirect election, the Basic Law took away the President’s power to appoint the Chancellor, and instead provided that the Chancellor is elected directly by the Bundestag. The President is required to accept the choice of the Bundestag: Basic Law, Article 63: Election and Appointment of the Federal Chancellor.
As well, the Basic Law did away with motions of no-confidence, which had led to instablity and given the President of the Weimar Republic repeated opportunities to choose the Chancellor in a situations where no party had a clear majority. The Basic Law instead provides for constructive non-confidence: the way for the Bundestag to vote non-confidence is to elect a new Chancellor to replace the current Chancellor: Basic Law, Article 67: Constructive Vote of Non-Confidence. If the motion for no confidence is not accompanied by an election of a new Chancellor, the President’s only option is to dissolve the Bundestag for a general election: Basic Law, Article 68: Vote of Confidence; Dissolution of the Bundestag.
Thus, the successful German Basic Law did not simply substitute an indirectly elected President for the monarch, but preserve the broad powers previously held by the monarch. The Basic Law drastically reduced the powers of the President as well, stripping him of the broad powers previously held by the monarch and the Weimar President.
Now, I’m not suggesting that the fall of the Weimar Republic was solely attributed to the powers of the Reichspräsident. There were numerous other factors, notably a lack of committement to democratic, constitutional rule by many of the senior politicians in the Weimar period. Countries with long-established democratic, monarchical traditions, with constitutional conventions that restrict the strong powers of the Crown, might be able to make the transition more smoothly. Nonetheless, the German experience is a strong object lesson suggesting that simple substitution of a President for the Crown, without reducing the major constitutional powers of the Crown at the same time, can lead to significant problems.
Any basic encyclopedia article on the U.S. will denominate the president as “head of state” and “head of government” both. And he does “enact” the laws by signing them. He can only sign what Congress gives him – but can the British PM do more? Pelosi’s position is more analogous to the Speaker of the House of Commons, not the PM.
We don’t need them OR even want them, I think. However, there are normally more pressing political issues to get bothered about, so even if most people either don’t want them or couldn’t care less, there’s a bit of inertia that lets them carry on, really.