YMMV, of course, but I’d say that here in Canada, the incoming party can only get so much mileage out of that - might be able to spend about 12 to 18 months after the election blaming the other party for the mess they left behind, but after that, it wears thin. As Brainglutton notes, the new government is responsible, and since it controls both the legislative agenda and the purse strings, at some point the voters say, ‘Yeah, but you’re the government now, so what are you going to do to fix it?’
For the most part, Orders-in-Council are authorised by statute, granting a particular power to the Crown. OC’s based on the prerogative aren’t nearly as common as statutory ones.
So the Prime Minister and Cabinet are using powers that have been considered and granted by Parliament. They’re not using an independent authority, such as presidential powers in the US system.
Internal disagreement among the majority party in Congress plays a significant role. US Congressional majorities are typically coalitional, because individual members are not united around one platform nor dependent upon the national party.
As to the example given, note that voter approval is not just a question of the electorate’s current views but also of what they are likely to think at the time of the next election, i.e., can we get this invasion largely done with by the time the voters pass judgment. And the views of the armed forces don’t really figure into this equation; if they decline to obey civilian authority, then we’re outside the constitutional order anyway.
Starting military action may be a bad example, because that can be done under the US system with much the same lack of constraint as in the UK. Yes, a formal declaration of war requires agreement among both houses and the president. Short of that level of formality, though, the president has a lot of leeway to order troops around, while Congress’ powers to defund such an action come later in the game, and Supreme Court supervision much more so.
Certain elements of civil liberties may show greater differences. The UK’s recent changes to the scope of the rights against self-incrimination and double jeopardy, for instance, were accomplished by Parliamentary vote. In the US, an attempt to make those changes through the ordinary legislative process would likely be blocked by the courts.
Still to be determined is the full reach of the European Convention on Human Rights; its application to the UK has already annoyed British conservatives: European Convention on Human Rights - Wikipedia
That’s what I said.
A palace revolution, I’d call it.
The biggest problem with the parliamentary democracy system is the party whip. The party essentially rubber-stamps the prime minister and his cronies’ actions, unless it becomes so repulsive or obviously a loser course of action that, in the case of Thatcher’s poll tax or Blair’s Iraq, eventually they have no choice but to leave.
I think too - the British system is far better than the Canadian one. (I’d like to hear comments from down under…) There are 312 seats or so in the Canadian parliament. (changes every 10 years). The majority party if theya re lucky, get about 170 or so. 50 members are officials like cabinet ministers, whip, etc. who MUST follow party line. Another 30 to 50 are given lesser roles, head of committees, assistant ministers, etc. The remaining 70 or so - most of them are hoping to get noticed and move up in the next cabinet shuffle. The number of members who know they are going nowhere (pissed off the PM?) and have nothing to lose and don’t mind getting uppity are pretty small - 10 or 20. Unless there’s a minority, uppity members and opposition members are irrelevant.
Compare that with Britain. The parliament is about 600 MP’s, but the other numbers are about the same. A majority is, let’s say, 350 MP’s. Subtract the cabinet, hangers-on of 100 and you have 250. Even if half those expect they have the connections and hope in hell of moving into cabinet, there’s still 100 to 150 MPs who know they have no hope in hell of anything but being a lowly back-bencher. They only have to concern themselves that policy not get so unpopular that they could lose their seat in the next election. That’s a very rowdy and restless caucus to manage.
Pierre Trudeau, former PM of Canada, OTOH is famous for saying that backbench MP’s are nobodies 50 yards from parliament hill. That gives you a rough idea how much he cared about them.
The ability of the senate in Canada (or HoL in UK) to block legislation, or teh crown to refuse to assent - that’s like the “nuclear option”. If you use it, you better be really sure that it’s more popular than the government position, or they’ll run against that option and then change the rules to prevenet a reccurance.
Only once did I hear of the GG possibly refusing to sign a bill in Canada; then gov-gen’l Eric Schreyer told the arrogant Mr. Trudeau that he would likely not sign the constitution bill if it did not have a “consensus” from the provinces and the other parties. Of course, this was along with other challenges that went to the supreme court and to the British government, but Trudeau saw the writing on the wall and got consensus.
Wait, why is any of that a problem with the parliamentary system? Sounds more like a feature than a bug.
The reality is that very few will defy the party line on anything of consequence, be they young or old. The payroll vote has swollen grossly in recent decades for no other reason than to reduce the surplus without office or hopes. The party managers have been in the habit of sending the surplus home so that they don’t have the chance to hang around Westminster and cause trouble.
The OPs original point is rather off the mark. It’s not that the H of C has so much power (as distinct from the government in the H of C), but how little. The ordinary Member has very little chance to influence anything.
The ‘people’s budget’ was largely a picked fight. Home Rule was the real cause of the clash.
This analysis assumes that the senior members of the cabinet are united. At least from my observation of what happens in Australia, that’s not so: a lot of them have ambitions to become PM, and see the current PM as a roadblock in their career path. So, while they might take care not to appear disloyal in public, in private they’ll be regularly testing political opinion both inside the parliamentary party and outside. And (as with John Major in 1990, and Paul Keating 1n 1991) it’s possible for a senior cabinet member to topple the party leader and replace her or him.
The Senate allows any single Senator to slow things down to a crawl. The filibuster rule allows any coalition of 41 to stop any action entirely. The Democrats are a very loose coalition, consisting of everyone and every stripe who disagree with the Republican platform. Combined with zero party discipline, this means that 60 must agree at all times not on just what is best, but that they must move forward at the same time. It is like herding cats. When abused to the maximum, as it is now being abused, this leads to the majority party looking like idiots.
Indeed. For what can happen with a body less respectful of the first minister, look at the typical lengths of service for PM’s in the Italian Parliament.
(emph added)
ERII is much loved & respected. JasRII was not, ergo the Glorious Revolution.
There was a lot more to that affair. It’s been a while since I studied the Patriation Reference (and even longer since living through the daily news as it was happening); but as I recall, much of the question had to do with constitutional tradition and precedent as to how many provinces were necessary for consensus on amending the constitution. As I remember things, Schreyer was contemplating dissolving Parliament if Trudeau insisted on getting his way, without being absolutely sure that what he wanted to do was constitutionally okay.
If you’re interested, see the Reference Re a Resolution to amend the Constitution, [1981] 1 S.C.R. 753 (link). A lot of the details are found in there. Another excellent (and much more readable) resource on the political questions and events at that time is Edward McWhinney’s Canada and the Constitution 1979-82: Patriation and the Charter of Rights, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982).
Jeez, one of those guys, Amintore Fanfani, was PM five times from 1954-87, but never for more than three years at a time. Never heard of him.
Old joke: Two Italian backbenchers are sitting through a long, boring parliamentary debate. One whispers to the other, “I think I’ll take a nap.” Later, he wakes up, looks at his watch, and realizes that almost three hours have passed. He asks his seatmate, “Did I miss anything important?”
“No,” the other man says, “but you were Prime Minister twice.”
This sort of behaviour used to be possible here, but the activities of the Irish Nationalist Members in the 1880s prompted the House to make changes to its rules to put limits on that tactic, and now there is very little of it. Indeed most Bills now proceed on a strict timetable [guillotine] with discussion cut off and a vote taken after a set time.
I know the U.S. Senate prides itself as “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” but I yearn for the day it abolishes the filibuster and adopts the Irish rule.
As a Canadian who spent six years in the U.S., I consider this a feature, not a bug.
At first, I observed that in the U.S., real consensus and coalition building is required. There’s actual horse-trading that has to go on to pass legislation. This seemed much more in the spirit of Democracy to me: You have to actually convince people to vote for your bill, and likely compromise with them to get it passed.
Over the years, I continued to observe the crappy quality of the legislation this produced: loophole-ridden, donut-glued-to-a-bicycle bills defeated because of a minor amendment that had nothing to do with the original bill. The quality of U.S. legislation sucks because of the legislative process. You have over 25,000 gun laws at the federal level, and you still don’t have effective gun control, but you don’t have the absence of gun control either. You’ve just got a bureaucratic mess.
In comparison with Canada (and, I assume, Britain), a majority party can simply pass a law, and they do, subject only to potential backlash that will cost them in the next election (and this is a more significant worry than in the U.S.: the Progressive Conservative party went from a majority government under Mulroney to 2 seats in the House of Commons. They were destroyed). They pass legislation that’s sensible to them. There’s no need to buy off an errant senator or a swing vote that leads to weird amendments. They simply pass the law they think should be passed, which means generally that the law is at least internally consistent. It doesn’t need to pander to the base or capture centrists. If the governing party is a minority party, they negotiate with a second (or possibly third) party to buy their support, so you get agreement between two blocs, not twenty or thirty. Most crucially, you don’t get things like Ben Nelson demanding a bribe specific to Nebraska voters. You don’t get very location specific or interest group specific payoffs.
That is the argument for party discipline. Pork barrel is rare here (though not unknown. The largely redundant Humber Bridge was a gigantic bribe to enable the government to win the Hull by-election in 1966)
Well, in your system, as Churchill delightedly noted to Roosevelt, the Monarch declares war (on the advice of the PM and Cabinet, of course) – so Britain was able to declare war on Japan in December 1941 before the U.S. Congress could convene and get around to it.
But beyond that, you’re coorect that the Royal Veto, though it’s fallen into desuetude, remains possible when a PM goes beyond his proper scope of power. And yes, it would definitely provoke a constitutional crisis. Which is why a monarch would not use it unless he or she were representing the united will of a country against a megalomaniacal PM.
But the other part of the British system is what occurs behind the scenes. Conflict in America is resolved openly, by and large; conflict in Britain is resolved by compromise behind the scenes before the measure is ever brought to vote.
Elizabeth’s experience has reportedly led her to strongly discourage some ill-thought proposals to the PM and a few responsible ministers, behind the scenes, with the result that the proposals were modified before being put forward for enactment into law. This is not “the monarch exerting her will over her ministers” – the measures were ones they favored; her counsel led them to avoid pitfalls in putting them into place, that she had encountered years before but the were not aware of. She is not brilliant but is insightful.
Likewise, the advice of a wide variety of people is brought to bear to influence the PM to cause to be enacted and signed into law only those measures that will presumably be supported by the majority of the country. The Leader of the Opposition has a real role to play; so do various Ministers, Lords, backbenchmen in Commons, etc. The result is (ideally and often in practice) to arrive by compromise and consensus at a measure that will command popular approval.