historical thoughts

[swan_tower]

I'm randomly on Wikipedia, reading the entry on the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and it's sparking some interesting thoughts.

I suspect Americans have a hard time grokking the UK system of government because to us, it looks kind of haphazard. The government of the United States was designed; if you sit down with the Constitution and read the first three or four Articles, you know more or less how we work. The UK Constitution isn't even a document; it's a collection of documents and conventions and general force of habit, accumulated over the centuries. You could graphically represent the difference by putting maps of Washington, D.C. and central London next to each other. One of these was planned; the other happened by accident.

So you can't easily say who the first Prime Minister was, because nobody ever sat down and created the office. Walpole kind of was, in terms of the power he held, but people fought about the term for over a hundred years, and apparently no two lists of PMs are alike, because the criteria for inclusion vary. It's interesting to me, though, that the office grew out of the Treasury. I suspect -- and this is probably me re-inventing the wheel of some Marxist branch of historical study -- that you can view the growth of modern democracy as a process wherein the root of political power shifted from control of armed force to the control of money. (And there's probably an interesting comparison in there somewhere, between the West and Third World military dictatorships. I'm beginning to feel like I ought to have majored in history after all.)

It makes me realize, too -- given the season we're in right now, over here in the U.S. -- how amazingly stable our government has been. I don't hold with whatever dude it is who declared that history's over, that we've arrived at the final, triumphant form of government; democracy on this scale is still the new kid on the political block, and might not have as much staying power as that guy thinks. There are dynasties that lasted longer than the United States of America. But when I compare the succession of U.S. presidents with that of monarchies or Prime Ministers, it's kind of impressively . . . boring. In a good way. The biggest weirdnesses we have are: FDR with his four terms; Grover Cleveland with his non-consecutive terms; a small handful of male relatives who occupied the same office. A couple of assassinations and deaths in office, whereupon their successors picked up and kept going. And the Civil War, but even then, all that happened politically was that part of the country seceded and formed its own country. I don't think we've ever had, say, two rival Presidents running around, both claiming their Cabinet and Congress are the real ones. Or anything to even approach the Wars of the Roses.

(Yes, most of my comparisons are to British history. For obvious reasons. But I've studied other countries, too.)

(Okay, my brain just offered up Emperor Norton. Who is entertaining, but not exactly mainstream American history.)

So, yeah. As contentious as our elections have been lately, and as freaked out as some people are by the possibility of a black man* leading our country, on the whole? We still have an awfully rational and stable thing going on over here.

I have other, unrelated political thoughts to post, but it occurs to me that if I put them here, one half of the post or the other will probably get all the attention in the comments, so I'll save it for a separate entry later on.


*By which we signify a half-Kenyan black, half-Kansas white guy born in Hawaii and raised partly in Indonesia. Don't you love how modern American society still boils everything down to one-word reductionist evaluations of skin shade?

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The idea is, but the exectutive and legislative branches immediately break up into a twisting mass of sub-bodies, all changing at different times. It makes it hard to see where any continuity could come from.

By sub-bodies, do you mean the House and Senate in the legislative and the departments in the executive? Or the committees further down the food chain? (I think the committees are more or less the same as in a Parliamentary system. Or at least that's the assumption I operate on.)

Continuity in the legislative branch comes in part from the fact that senators and representatives regularly serve multiple consecutive terms. The staggered terms of the Senate also contribute: unless somebody leaves office early, you never have both Senate seats for a given state open at once. Having things change at different times helps create the continuity you're looking for. The Senate, like the Lords, are supposed to be the more conservative body, in the sense that change comes less rapidly to them. I have little idea, though, of what the Lords' power is these days; the answer seems to be "not a whole lot." Which means that your system is kind of but not really bicameral, and that confuses me.

Open admission: if you ask me about the relative authority and roles of the House versus the Senate, that's when I shrug and say, hell if I know. <g> They both have the power to draft and pass laws, and they need cooperation from the other body; that's all I know.

Continuity in the executive was deliberately broken up by the limitation of a president to two terms. There's arguments over whether term limits are a good idea, though; if we have a president who's still popular and supported after eight years, why shouldn't people be allowed to elect him again? Which is why you often get the incumbent's vice president running as his successor. But our system is designed to make sure nobody can consolidate too much permanent or even long-term power. Does it have its downside? Sure. No question about it. There's a reason people kept electing FDR.

To my mind, having a Prime Minister and Cabinet who aren't also Members of Parliament is the strange thing, since it makes them impersonal.

Whereas on this side of the ocean, the idea that you don't elect the guy in charge of your country is the weird, impersonal thing. I can think of plenty of Democrats I'm happy to see in the House or Senate, but I wouldn't want them elevated to the presidency. And while at times I envy the fact that you can chuck a party out of power as soon as you decide they suck -- man, I wish we could do the same to Bush -- that seems a lot more uncertain than knowing elections will come like regularly scheduled clockwork.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Heh, I remember it being noted that more people voted for the mayor of London (Ken Livingstone at the time) than for Tony Blair.

They don't actually get to toss out a party that soon. A stable majority can cling on to power for five years; it's when the parliamentary majority falls apart that the Crown may call for new elections. OTOH, I think the party should be able to change leaders mid-stream, though it doesn't seem to happen much; I kept expecting Blair to go down, but no.

Tax bills start in the House, which can impeach; Senate gets to try impeachments, and approves judges, treaties, and Cabinet or ambassadorial appointments.

UK obviously was more bicameral, or even power-heavy at the Lords, but power's shifted away from the blatantly undemocratic body.

One tragic thing IMO about the US is that we have this untapped potential for political experiments. All the state constitutions are near clones of the federal one -- bicameral legislature (despite lacking the tension between populace and states that led to the House and Senate) and governor (though of varying power) and all. Not one imitated the mother country.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Not one imitated the mother country.

Do you think anybody would want to be the un-American state that decided the congressional model wasn't good enough for them?

My understanding is that British political parties can change leaders: by a vote of no confidence (which doesn't happen much anymore), or by the leader resigning when his position gets too rocky. I'm curious as to how a party can lose its majority not at an election, though -- is it because MPs abandon ship? Or are there minor elections in between the general ones, that can slowly change the party map?

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I was thinking no-confidence votes, mostly; the party may have a majority but it's not supporting you. Which seems like it should lead to a new PM but feels like it means new elections in practice. Maybe because the rejected PM can call elections. Or maybe I'm just wrong.

But there's also when the PM doesn't have a majority from her own party, and leads a coalition of parties; then obviously one of the components might explicitly rebel, and if no other coalition can form, elections!
By-elections of dead or resigned or convicted MPs could do it as well but I think that's a minor cause.

[dr_whom]

In general you're right about the homogeneity of state constitutions; but Nebraska is the exception, with a nonpartisan unicameral legislature.

[fhtagn.livejournal.com]

Open admission: if you ask me about the relative authority and roles of the House versus the Senate, that's when I shrug and say, hell if I know. They both have the power to draft and pass laws, and they need cooperation from the other body; that's all I know.

Pretty much. You've got a weird mixture of proportional and fixed representation, tied to what I believe is a first past the post voting system, with each branch of government having certain veto powers over each other branch. From the outside, it looks like it was carefully constructed to ensure that noone ever knew where the power was and thus allow cults of personality to force things through.

I have little idea, though, of what the Lords' power is these days; the answer seems to be "not a whole lot." Which means that your system is kind of but not really bicameral, and that confuses me.

Lords does two things - it's the final court of appeal, and it has the power of veto over Parliament. The latter is, I think, my favourite bit of Lords and the bit that Tony's cocked up most. Lords cannot propose laws, but is required to pass them. Previously, hereditary peers meant that whilst the members might have party affiliations, they were beholded (ideally) to noone save their own consciences. Now that new peers are appointed by the PM ... a lot of suspicious things have been passed by Labour's Lords. There are those who'd call it undemocratic, and they'd be missing the point. Lords acts as a stabilising influence, preventing a suddenly radical parliament (and at the moment, Labour's Whip) from passing laws it believes to be unjust. It does slow the turning of the wheel of social progress, but it slows social regression even faster and, frankly, I'd prefer a slower march towards equality than the rapid descent to totalitarianism that so many notionally elected governments have allowed or encouraged. Our own, for instance. Lords' most publicised recent action was to shoot down Labour's insane and offensive proposed bill allowing for detention without charge for 42 days of anyone accused (no burden of proof necessary) of anything terrorism related. Members of Lords can be lobbied, but they're much harder to force, thankfully.

Whereas on this side of the ocean, the idea that you don't elect the guy in charge of your country is the weird, impersonal thing.

I think we do. We know who the leaders of the parties are, and if we're members of said parties then we participate at one level or another in their selection. Mind you, our PM's powers are, as I understand it, far more limited than your President's, so I can understand that to a certain extent. I still don't understand why it has to take so long and cost so much money with all the primaries and what-have-you. It's a great system for ensuring a local representative has visited and knows all the towns he might represent; it's clunky as hell for an empire spanning a continent with some change. Surely, now that TV, radio, newspapers with simultaneous release across the country and of course the internet are available, a slightly more efficient and fast system could be developed?

And while at times I envy the fact that you can chuck a party out of power as soon as you decide they suck -- man, I wish we could do the same to Bush -- that seems a lot more uncertain than knowing elections will come like regularly scheduled clockwork.

If only it were that easy. ::sighs:: Still, the fact that the ruling party, should one exist, can't rest easy is a comforting thing. It just doesn't keep people as honest as we'll all like.

N.B. This has been typed first thing in the morning, before coffee. It's a bit rambling and incoherent.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

You've got a weird mixture of proportional and fixed representation

The result of an argument between the people who wanted every state to be equal, and those who wanted power allocated according to population. I kind of like the balance, actually.

From the outside, it looks like it was carefully constructed to ensure that noone ever knew where the power was and thus allow cults of personality to force things through.

The way we usually phrase it is, it was carefully constructed for "checks and balances." :-) The idea is that each branch can keep the other branches from running away with all the power. I think it actually thwarts cults of personality, barring particularly favorable circumstances. (Such as one party controlling the presidency, the House, and the Senate, with strong party discipline enforcing votes that favor the president's agenda.)

The fact that the Lords are both the final court of appeal and a veto power is again, to me, confusing; that means they're mixing what I think of as two or three separate functions. (Judicial and legislative, and maybe executive, too.) But the things I've been reading lead me to understand that their veto power is severely limited anyway, so we're back to "how exactly do they fit into this system?"

The thing about primaries is that they allow voters more control over parties. If we voted the Democrats into power, and then the party chose its leader, we would have Hillary Clinton in the White House. She came close, but in the end the public decided they preferred Obama's policies, which the Democratic establishment was initially not so wild about. And it has a real benefit in terms of preparing candidates, too; I'm told Obama is a much better debater now, thanks to his trial by fire during the primaries. (I also consider it a benefit that the Republican primary this cycle was akin to tossing five rabid weasels in a sack together, of which McCain was not so much the victor as the last weasel standing. Though I understand that from another point of view this may be a downside to the process.) But I do admit there are flaws to our primary system that we really ought to work out if we can, starting with the "me first!" idiocy we had this year.

I suspect that the very scale you refer to is an argument in favor of primaries. Without them, the D.C. establishment would exercise an even greater influence on the direction of a party, with bad results for the folks who are physically or culturally on the other side of the country.

Question: what exactly does it mean when they say so-and-so couldn't form a government?

[fhtagn.livejournal.com]

I suspect that the very scale you refer to is an argument in favor of primaries. Without them, the D.C. establishment would exercise an even greater influence on the direction of a party, with bad results for the folks who are physically or culturally on the other side of the country.

I would argue that that's a failing of a two party system more than anything else, in that it requires that a vastly disparate set of ideals and views of where the country should go need to be shoe-horned into two parties who, from this side of the pond, don't look too different because they have to be so many things to so many people. Hence the troubles in the Republicans between the capitalists and the theocrats.

Question: what exactly does it mean when they say so-and-so couldn't form a government?

That no one group of people who agreed to share power could form and there was no majority within Parliament to support the Cabinet and Prime Minister - the PM can only be PM if enough people support him within Parliament to allow him to form a Cabinet.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Okay, but how do they prevent him from forming a Cabinet? He chooses the Cabinet ministers, yes? Which officially are appointed by the sovereign, if I remember my earlier reading correctly, but I don't know where the Commons comes into the process.

I won't argue the failings of a two-party system, but I don't think my point would be much different if we had three or four parties. To get a president into office requires the influence of a national party, or at least one that commands enough support across the nation to beat the others to the finish line. You can't win from D.C. alone. I suppose if we had (say) four political parties, New England or the Deep South or whoever might be able to scrape together 30% of the vote and beat out the other three splitting the remaining 70%, but that doesn't look like much of an improvement to me, since coalition government (at least of the sort formed after the elections) doesn't exist here. So we have national parties, and the presidential primaries give people a say in who gets put up for that office.

Do your parties have nominations? It occurs to me the primary argument could be tossed out if five Republican candidates could all run for the same office in the general election, instead of the party putting its backing behind a single candidate. But man, that sounds like it would be chaos.

It boggles me, though, that people say our two major parties don't look too different. On the level of individual candidates, I may agree, and admittedly the political winds have led to a certain amount of rhetorical see-sawing on particular points, especially wrt economics. But when you get past the rhetoric (we need to educate our children! and protect American workers! and end corruption in government!) and start looking at the intended policies, I find it hard to see much similarity between the two. It might be better to say there isn't a single dominant philosophy in either party, that shapes all their positions on the various issues; that, I could agree with.

[fhtagn.livejournal.com]

Okay, but how do they prevent him from forming a Cabinet? He chooses the Cabinet ministers, yes? Which officially are appointed by the sovereign, if I remember my earlier reading correctly, but I don't know where the Commons comes into the process.

He has to choose them from the Commons. If there aren't enough people in Commons that he can trust to work with him, he can't form a working government.

As for your comment about the Deep South ... that's the inevitable consequences of having so many cultures lumped under one government and then having that government being a democracy. It's great if you're part of the majority and the majority is also fairly tolerant. Otherwise ...

Do your parties have nominations? It occurs to me the primary argument could be tossed out if five Republican candidates could all run for the same office in the general election, instead of the party putting its backing behind a single candidate. But man, that sounds like it would be chaos.

Not in the way you guys do. The PM-to-be is the leader of the dominant party (or head of the coalition of parties; I don't think there's an reason we could have an indepentent PM chosen as a neutral and unifying force in a suitabley hung parliament) and the members of the party, both rank and file and high ranking, select the leader. The main body of the party, MPs and the like, normally divide supporting one or more candidates who're then voted upon by everyone. Once a leader is selected, the party is then expected to support them until a reason for them to be replaced appears.

It boggles me, though, that people say our two major parties don't look too different.

It looks like a choice between far-right and centre-right, neither too hot on civil liberties, and both pretty imperialist in their foreign policy. The main difference is that the Democrats seem to have fewer nutjobs who believe that God whispers to them, telling them what to do or that the world was formed in 4004BC. A gross simplificiation, I know, but most people I know here regard the Republican/Democrat divide as one between the lesser of two evils.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

He has to choose them from the Commons. If there aren't enough people in Commons that he can trust to work with him, he can't form a working government.

I have a hard time envisioning how someone with enough influence to be at the head of a party that's won the majority could end up in this situation, but okay.

Re: primaries -- I was thinking more of downticket races than the PM. Does Labour nominate a candidate for a seat, and the Conservatives nominate theirs, and so on? Or are those races free-for-alls, with each candidate advertising their party without being directly backed by it?

I guess, regarding our own parties, that I tend to be viewing the Democrats from a point of view planted further to the left (though not so left as to impress Europe, I suppose), so I see a party that's more than center-right. But due to the aforementioned tendency toward building coalitions before the elections, the party has to draw in enough centrist types to have some influence, and that muddies the picture. The problem lately, though, hasn't been ideology so much as spine. Democrats keep voting for things I consider to be stupid and/or morally wrong, simply because they let themselves be pushed into it. But we're fixing that, slowly but (I hope) surely.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

If there's a head of a party that has a majority, he's probably the PM and forming a Cabinet. Inability to form a government would generally be when no party does have a majority, and no stable majority coalition of parties will form.

[fhtagn.livejournal.com]

Re: primaries -- I was thinking more of downticket races than the PM. Does Labour nominate a candidate for a seat, and the Conservatives nominate theirs, and so on? Or are those races free-for-alls, with each candidate advertising their party without being directly backed by it?

Each party puts forward a candidate, and there's decision as to which candidate to put forward is a matter for internal arrangement. That said, parties don't always put forward a candidate, and in a seat where they're particularly weak, they'll often put forward a no-hoper. For instance, in the recent kerfuffle when David Davis resigned his position to force a by-election over the 42-day detention malarkey, neither Labour nor the LibDems ran against him, and he was reelected. Additionally, anyone can run for MP, provided they can prove a certain minimal support and stand the deposit. We've not had many independent MPs lately, but they do happen. I don't know how many votes the Monster Raving Looney Party get each election, but we have had worryingly large numbers of people vote for the BNP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Party) before now. This page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPs_elected_in_the_UK_general_election,_2005) shows that a fair few parties are represented.

I have a hard time envisioning how someone with enough influence to be at the head of a party that's won the majority could end up in this situation, but okay.

Independents used to be more common, the British parties are just as divided internally as any others, and if you end up in a coalition and can't satisfy your backers, you're screwed. Add in the fact that anything the PM wants passed has to go through Commons and without a decent majority, you're even more screwed. Ted Heath is a good example of that.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

So do voters in a constituency have any influence over which candidate a party puts forward? If it's "a matter for internal arrangement," it doesn't sound like it. I mean, I expect that an individual could take part in that process by joining the party and going to events or whatever it takes to build up the influence to affect that choice, but it sounds less open to me. (Simpler, faster, and cheaper, but less open.)

[fhtagn.livejournal.com]

Yes, in that internal in this case refers to members of the party and not elected officials of the party. It generally seems to come out as a choice filtered by whose local and who has come up through the lower ranks as councillors and other local officials and gained popularity and respect that way. I should add the caveat there that I'm not actually a member of any party, so don't know the actual inner workings, just what I've been told by friends who are. I think that for the Tories, for instance, candidates are put forward or put themselves forward, the central party filters that down to a shortlist and then returns that to the constituency party for them to decide vote on.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Okay, I follow. I don't know enough about closed and open primaries over here, and primary elections versus caucuses, to judge how they compare.

[fhtagn.livejournal.com]

Having just checked a few things with a friend who is, in fact, moderately politically active, Labour do things more or less the same way. And, more annoyingly, I got a few things wrong.

Lords can't veto a bill, they can only delay it for a time and bounce it back to Commons. Also, apparently (and this is weird, since I clearly knew it because of all the figures I've seen come and go, it's an odd blindspot) Cabinet is not solely limited to MPs but may also include Lords as well.

[tybalt-quin.livejournal.com]

Just to add a point quickly - for an undemocratic body, the House of Lords has served to vote down unpopular legislation (most recently the proposed 42 day detention of suspected terrorists without trial), thereby forcing the ruling party to drop legislation.