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It is often the case that Americans in general, and people on the left in particular, will decry the makeup of our political system, directing much of their anger at the current two-party system, and our 'checks and balances'-based Federal government. Often, the European model of Parliamentary government elected via proportional representation will be offered up as an alternative. While this system does have some obvious advantages, and in some ways is more democratic than ours, in this diary, I intend to show that it has other flaws that can be quite undemocratic.
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.
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