The Role of Democracy in Parliamentary Systems

by: Valatan

Sun Aug 02, 2009 at 11:00

What Is A Parliamentary System?

First, before we begin, I should explain exactly what a Parliamentary system is.  For this, I will take as a model a government with at least four strongly-disciplined political parties elected to sit in a Parliament.   What will be described below is relatively close to the system that exists or existed in the Netherlands, Sweden, Israel, the French Fourth Republic, pre-'90s Italy, and the German Weimar Republic*, along with many other examples.  In these systems, the main components of the government has are; a head of state (usually a monarch**, the monarch's representative***, or an independently elected head of state****), a Parliament^, and an executive (essentially, the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, and the executive agencies under the control of the Cabinet).  The primary distinction between a Parliamentary system and a Presidential system like that of the United States is that within a Presidential system the executive is primarily accountable to the Head of State, while in a Parliamentary system the executive is primarily accountable to the Parliament.  

What About Accountability?

Now, how does this accountability play out?  Well, the most obvious way that this happens is the mechanism of the vote of no confidence.  The essential meaning of the vote of no confidence is that a Prime Minister and her/his Ministers (from here on, we will just call them the government) can be removed by a simple majority vote of Parliament.  As a result of this, no government can exist without at least an unwillingness of a majority of Parliament to vote against them.

If all of the parties holding positions in the government form a majority in Parliament, then you have a majority coalition forming the government.  Otherwise, it is a minority government.  The latter case has been the tradition in Sweden, where you typically have had the Social Democrats holding 40% of the seats in their parliament, the Riksdag, but were unwilling to form a coalition with the Communists, which would have been necessary to form a majority government.  Instead, they would merely count on the Communists to not vote against them in a no confidence vote.  On the other hand, for the past two terms, you have had minority Conservative governments in Canada, as the three center-left parties' reservations about each other have prevented them from coming together to remove the Conservatives from power.

Follow me below the flip to investigate the problems with Parliamentary government.

Finally, one might ask how the head of state fits into all of this, and it would be realistic to say that the head of state's role is largely ceremonial.  But they do serve one important role - the selection of the prime minister.  This is one place where a somewhat undemocratic slant fits into the administration of a Parliamentary government.   Usually, this is a trivial task, as party leaders have worked out what they think the coalition should be, and the 'wrong' Prime Minister won't net a majority vote.  But it will sometimes come to a head.

As a particularly dramatic example of this, consider the last Weimar Reichstag.  The Nazis gained 38% of the seats in the Reichstag, while the German Communists held 15% of the seats.  Therefore, the government was left with various center-left and center-right factions desperately trying to form minority governments with each other in order to keep two major extremist parties out of government.  After several such schemes ended in failure, the German President von Hindenburg felt inclined to offer Hitler the Chancellorship of the country.  So, while a majority of Germans of the time did not vote for the Nazi party, the country found itself under Hitler's leadership.

A much less egregious example shows up in the events that took place in Canada last year, where the Governor General (the Queen's representative and the Canadian Head of State) temporarily dissolved Parliament rather than allow a vote of no confidence to take place, an act that ultimately saved the Conservative minority government.  This move was eventually supported by polling, but this is a lot of power to be intermittently wielded by someone that is either unelected or typically functioning in the background.

Advantages

Now, before I go into full-bore pointing out the limitations of Parliamentary government, I should also point out its advantages.  First, the problem of 'gridlock' is almost completely removed.  Having a Parliamentary system is roughly equivalent to having the Speaker of the House and the President be the same person, while having the Secretary of Treasury also be the head of the House Finance committee, etc, which is the opposite of what the American system does, when it requires that  legislators resign their seats in order to take on positions in the Executive branch.  This basically means that the actions of the Legislature and the executive are generally pretty well coordinated, particularly if the government is a majority government.

In this system, it is generally a huge shock/disappointment/embarassment when the Prime Minister cannot get a bill that (s)he wants passed through Parliament, rather than the somewhat commonplace occurrence that it is in the States.  Also, you do have a mechanism to ensure that the government in place at least approximates the majority will of people, since the government is beholden to a majority vote in Parliament, and the multiparty Parliament represents a broad range of individual concerns.  These are important advantages over the American system that should not be ignored, and make the Parliamentary system more democratic than the Presidential system.

Disadvantages

But there are also a series of clear disadvantages to the Parliamentary system government, that are pushes toward less democracy.  The primary one is that this system of government is often much less responsive to elections than a Presidential system is.  Consider the following example, modified from this comment that I left, which was the original seed of this post:

Consider a Parliament formed by four major parties, the Christian Democrats (CD), the Social Democrats (SD), the Communists (C) and the neoliberal Free Democrats (FD).  They hold the following numbers of seats in a 100 seat Parliament:

CD: 30
SD: 51
FD: 9
C: 10

A major campaign finance scandal erupts, and the populace becomes disillusioned by the center, in particular, the apparently corrupt Social Democrats, who have been running the majority government for years.  The upcoming election results in the following new balance of seats:

CD: 20
SD: 36
FD: 15
C: 34

This election clearly represents a major shift away from the traditional center, as the populace has expressed their disgust with the two major parties by having them lose a net of 25 seats, representing a quarter of the Parliament.  Also, note the major leftward shift of the electorate, as the Communists have tripled their vote total.  Note that the Social Democrats, however, still manage to maintain a plurality of seats in the Parliament.  Therefore, the head of state offers the prime ministership to the Social Democrats.

The obvious choice would be to form a coalition with the Communists, who were the big winners of the election, and the populace clearly wanted a leftward shift.  Instead, however, the leader of the Socialists opts to form a coalition with the Christian Democrats, which results in a net majority in the Parliament.  Therefore, the result of this election is a government that is more establishment, and more right-wing than the previous government.  Such arrangements have not been uncommon in Parliamentary governments, and the typical five year window between elections is sufficient that often popular anger about such moves can die down enough that there isn't much popular resentment over such moves, either.

Note that, also, the above arrangement is very dependent on the ability of the Christian Democrats to negotiate with the Socialists.  This brings up another undemocratic kink in the Parliamentary system: that negotiations between party leaders is often more important than popular will, or even the desires of backbencher MPs.

As another example, note Ehud Barack's acceptance of the defense Ministry in Israel and the forming of the Labour-Likud "unity" government, something that was quite distasteful both to Labour voters and to many members of the Labour party.  Now, one might argue that the party leadership can simply be removed, but this is often a difficult task, as ranking party members can often either cherrypick the most favorable districts (Imagine Harry Reid with the ability to choose to run in Rhode Island) , or they receive the first line on the party list, which means that they get seated before the backbenchers do in the event of a party's catastrophic loss.

This dynamic is once again very prevalent in Israel, where the same few politicians have survived and repeatedly revived their political careers as party leaders over the course of several decades.

An Ideological Minority Government-The Case of Canada

Another undemocratic element of this type of arrangement shows up in the current Canadian government.  While, under the results of the 2008 election, the Conservative party managed to only win approximately 46% of the seats in Parliament with 37% of the vote, they formed a minority government against the three center-left parties.  Therefore, despite the fact that a clear majority of Canadians voted in such a way that indicated that they desired a center-left government, the result of the electoral process was a center-right government, due to the calculations of the various party leaders involved.  

A Majority Government Dependent on Small Special Interests

Finally, there is a much more obscure way that you can have odd dependencies in Parliamentary governments: A majority government can often find itself beholden to relatively small special interests, if those interests are represented with a sufficiently well-positioned minor party.  In particular, note the role that the ADMK, a small regional party, held in the dissolution of the Indian Lok Sabha in 1999.  If the dominant coalition needs them to stay in power, the minor parties can wield power far out of proportion to the number of seats that they hold in Parliament.

Note that almost all of the above relates to the critical importance of having a government be supported by (or at least not actively opposed by) a majority in Parliament.  Some of what I am trying to do is show that there is an essential problem in representative democracy: governing and making decisions is essentially an indivisible process.

In a Presidential system with first past the post voting (like ours), you shift this problem at the first step: you narrow the choices to an essentially small number, and then force people to narrow their preferences.  Note that there is also an essential trust in the system to provide appropriate choices.  In a Parliamentary system with proportional representation, you shift this problem elsewhere: at the ballot box, the people have a lot of choices.  But once the voting has happened, the results of the election can have somewhat perverse effects on the way that the elected government will govern.  

I've gone on a lot, so at this point, I think I'll just leave it at that and await more discussion in the comments.

*While the thrust of this essay will not be to talk about electoral systems, each of these examples has a Parliament elected through a party list system with a relatively low "threshold."  Under these systems, people vote for the parties on election day, and the parties then get a number of seats in Parliament proportional to the vote that they received, conditional upon their vote total exceeding a certain threshold proportion of the vote.  This system makes individual members of Parliaments (MPs) very dependent on the party leadership, and therefore, candidates find themselves very beholden to their party machines.

**i.e., in England, Sweden, Japan, or the Netherlands

***Canada, and Australia, amongst others

****Italy, Israel, Ireland, India and France (though the French Fifth Republic properly is a hybrid Presidential/Parliamentary system)

^Though, of course, Parliaments have a great many different names: the Knesset in Israel, the Bundestag in Germany, the Lok Sabha in India