At about the time of the American Revolution, Great Britain herself was struggling to adopt a kind of democratic government. The result was the parliamentary system, where the executive branch is selected from the legislative body, while we went with a three branch system, where the executive, legislative, and judicial branches are completely separate.
However, when we examine democracies around the world, the parliamentary system seems to be more popular. I can understand that Britain’s former colonies have adopted it, but what about Germany and Japan? It seems that out of the G8 nations, everybody has a parliamentary system except the United States. Even France and Russia, where the President runs the government, has a premier or prime minister.
Why is the parliamentary system so popular worldwide? Do the citizens of those countries prefer it, or do the politicians?
G.B. did it out of necessity, because it allowed a single man to have great power and run the government as the Chief Executive but kept the King as proper Head of State. It just made sense for the person to run the government to be in Parliament. Although when the Brits first started getting Democratic the PM was often a member of the House of Lords so definitely not remotely chosen democratically.
France and Russia are both not Parliamentary systems, they have fairly strong Presidents. The head of their legislatures may have the name of Prime Minister or Premier but their powers are nothing like that of the British Prime Minister or the German Chancellor. It’s like if we renamed Speaker of the House “Prime Minister”, we wouldn’t have a parliamentary system. So yes, a majority (5 of 8) of G8 nations are Parliamentary, but it is wrong to say all of them are except the United States.
There’s glory for you!
Without quoting half the thread, the issue Martin Hyde raises is not, “Is there a President?” but rather “Who controls the majority of political power?” France devised the mixed system; Russia adopted one strikingly like it. Italy and pre-5th Republic France had Presidents who were Heads of State but effectively figureheads.
I think the American constitution was written in circumstances that favored a limited government. So we created a divided government that was self-limiting.
Most other countries appear to have had different priorities. They appear to have regarded the power of the monarchy as the biggest threat to liberty so they wanted a strong unified government that was able to stand up to a monarch.
The US (effectively) chose to make post-WWII Japan a parliamentary nation.
I believe that the issue is that a presidential system favors internal conflict, for the sake of (effectively) handicapping the ability for the government to actually do anything but that which is acceptable to basically everyone. Parliamentary systems lack that internal strife, and hence can (theoretically) make more sweeping changes and provide a more clean and focused public face. For a government which is worried about its ability to manage the nation after becoming a democratic republic, a parliamentary government is probably the safer route.
Remember that in most countries, they’ve had millenia of strong, despotic, individuals as their leader. The people aren’t used to and often find that they don’t like and don’t understand the idea of debate at the government level – let alone debate that they get to be a part of. It makes the nation feel very insecure, which lets any dissenters rise in power and try to take over the nation or at least act criminally within and near its borders. A stronger, unified government is more likely to last through the 3-10 new generations that need to be born and live under the system before the nations culture adopts to liberal governance.
There’s also the fact that, apparently, presidential systems last, on average, 21 years between some sort of regime change, as opposed to 73 years for parliamentary systems. Obviously, the US is an extreme outlier here, but this would certainly mean that at any given time, there would probably be more parliamentary systems around.
I wouldn’t know for Russia, but even though it’s often called a “semi-presidential” system, France has technically a parliamentary system, since the parliament can cast a no confidence vote forcing the government to resign and similarly, the executive can disolve the parliament and call for new elections, this being the hallmark of parliamentary systems (contrarily to the UK, though, dissolving the parliament isn’t done ordinarily to pick an “convenient” date for the election from the point of view of the majority. The only attempt to unconventionnally do so has been a failure of epic proportions for the executive. Its typical use is when a new president is elected and doesn’t have a majority in the parliament).
Also, if the president doesn’t have a majority in parliament, France turns into an actual parliamentary country, with the prime minister running the show. Even though in this case, the president retains some rarely used but very significant “reserve powers” (the most unusual in democracies being the possibility to take what are essentially dictatorial powers), and is still traditionnally (not constitutionnally) associated with foreign affairs and defense matters, making him even in this case significantly more important than, say, the German president.
That depends on other factors. In the UK, which is essentially a bipartisan system (well, not right now, but this is an exception), it’s probably true. But in countries with multiple parties that generally have to be run by coalitions, a parliamentary system might at the contrary become extremely unstable and unable to enact anything significant because the government will be overthrown every other day over mundane issues (or threatened to be if it dares enacting something that displeases the 5 MPs of one member of the coalition).
In the past, the lower house in Canada has had no party with a majority; currently, there’s no majority in the Australian lower house. In situations like that, the party leaders do their deals to put together an effective coalition. Everyone in those situations wants there to be a government that can govern, so you just find enough votes that will not just support the government today, but will promise to support it in the future.
For an extreme case, look at Tasmania. The voting system there makes it very likely that every time you have an election, the lower house is 15 Labor, 15 Liberal and 5 Green. So the Greens have to decide whether to support a Labor or Liberal government – and they do, leading to a pretty stable system.
It might be the case in Canada or Australia, but it certainly wasn’t historically in Italy or in France before the adoption of the current constitution.
Coalitions can also lead to giving minor parties an undue influence. It might not be that important for Tasmanian Greens, but the influence of Israel’s religious parties isn’t unconsequential at all.
No, that was the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution was written to create a strong central government, since limited government wasn’t working.
But since the Articles of Confederation was set up with a non-parliamentary legislature, the Constitution continued the legislature along those lines (though much modified).
In addition, many of the writers of the Constitution had a strong distaste for political parties and much of the thinking in the Constitution was to try to reduce the power of parties.* For that reason, they would not have wanted a parliamentary system. The founders were a bit naive about that – political parties started up almost immediately – but their thinking was that the current system would be less party-driven than a parliament.
*Part of the thinking behind the establishment of the Electoral College, with the idea that the electors would be beholden to no party or candidate.
No, I meant the Constitution. Although the existence of the Articles of Confederation was a part of the situation I referred to which led to a desire for a relatively limited government.
The Articles created a government that was limited almost to the point of impotence. While there were a lot of people who saw this as a problem and therefore sought a new stronger Constitution, there was also a lot of people who figured an impotent national government was a feature not a bug. And the Constitutionalists had to address those people by including some limitations in the national government they were creating.
Um, are you seriously saying that Americans are somehow more mature and thoughtful and able to deal politely and effectively with other points of view, while Europeans are just inherently fearful of diversity of opinion?
And if the supposed effect is because of the past millenia, well, going back a millenium, aren’t the ancestors of the majority of U.S. citizens also from these despotic conditions that somehow shaped Europeans? How exactly did sailing across an ocean remove the taint of having a despot opress their great-great-grandparents?
If, by “about the same time” you mean “a century before”, then yes. Otherwise, no.
The English Civil War (1642–1651) settled the question of who was really in charge, and the Bill of Rights of 1689 established it in laws which removed the power of the monarchy to do anything without the consent of parliament. The British royals have been figureheads, legally and in practice, ever since.
Americans like to imagine that they rebelled against the despot George III, but G3 didn’t have any say in the laws that governed the American colonies or anywhere else.
George III was in no way a “figurehead” comparable to the modern British monarchs. On the contrary, he meddled in politics and policy at every opportunity.
It’s true that by George’s time the monarch could no longer appoint ministers against the express disapproval of a majority of the House of Commons. But, at any given time, there were any number of possible ministries that might be acceptable to the Commons, and the monarch had wide latitude in choosing among them.
Furthermore, there were no “party lines”, and the government could never be sure of getting its measures through Parliament. King George actively lobbied against measures of which he disapproved, and his influence could be considerable, since members who agreed with him could be rewarded with patronage, court appointments, and preference in forming future ministries.
The “despotism” was exercised in the colonies by his royal governors, who acted in the King’s name (even when appointed on the “advice” of the Prime Minister), and it was very real. The royal governors vetoed bills, dismissed colonial legislatures, called out troops and quartered them in people’s homes, and exercised many of the powers which the Crown had forsworn at home.
Her Majesty’s Government still acts in the monarch’s name, but no amount of throwing the term ‘royal’ about gets away from the fact that the governors in America where representatives of the British Government, not under the direct control of the King.
Anyway, to answer the OP: so many governments have parliamentary systems was either because they evolved from monarchies, or because they chose to adapt the British system.
I was principally talking of non-European nations. In the case of European nations, moving to a parliamentary system was probably easier to accomplish since even monarchies (by the 19th and 20th centuries) had some form of a legislative body. Removing the monarch and leaving the legislative body is fairly easy. Those legislative bodies probably already had a number one position, with some method for selecting the person who should fill that role. Presto, parliamentary government.
But overall, it will depend on the specific nation.
Is the dominance of the parliamentary system an accident of history, precisely because of the colonial spread of the European nations?