Everything’s wrong with the parliamentary system
Here’s a quote from last month’s TIME magazine, describing the political situation in Iraq. The headline refers to “Iraq’s political disarray:”
…seven weeks after the election, Iraq’s politicians have not yet accepted the poll results, much less begun negotiating in earnest to form a new government. “We are now approaching the two-month period [since the election], and we are concerned the process is lagging,” Hill said at a briefing for foreign journalists. “We share the concern of those who believe that it’s time that the politicians got down to business and started forming a government.
Almost all coverage of the stalemate reads much the same way. The Iraqis are stuck in a particularly backwards, pitiful morass, borne from their country’s stubborn inability to grasp the basic principles of democratic government and the myopic pettiness of it’s amateurish politicians. I would argue, however, that the Iraqis aren’t really that much worse at democracy than many of the leading nations of the west. Consider:
Belgium is heading for a record 150 days with no government unless the Christian Democrat and Liberal election winners resolve a spat blocking their bid to form a coalition. Five months after the vote on 10 June, the two parties are still in disagreement over three issues. (November, 2007)
***
The stalemate in German politics deepened Monday, the day after an inconclusive national election result, as key party leaders rejected some of the coalition solutions that might otherwise lead to the formation of a new government and the selection of a chancellor. Most important, the chairman of the Social Democratic Party, Franz Müntefering, confirmed that Chancellor Gerhard Schröder would refuse to enter into any coalition with the main opposition party that did not choose Mr. Schröder himself as chancellor. (September, 2005)
***
The minority government of Canada teetered on the edge of collapse Friday, just six weeks after its re-election, as opposition parties discussed the formation of a coalition to replace the governing Conservatives…. If neither side backs down in the confrontation, the government will probably fall, perhaps as early as Monday, and Canada would either head into a snap election or into some sort of coalition led by the Liberals. (October, 2008)
And of course, most recently:
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a bid Friday to stay in office after Britain’s indecisive election, saying he is prepared to speak to any other party about forming an alliance. Jittery financial markets clamored for a quick resolution to the stalemate. (May, 2010)
In any of these stories you could replace the western politicians with names like “President Muntu” and they’d come off as describing some third world failed state. So clearly culture is not the dominant factor at play here.
The common thread that unites these politically unstable countries is the parliamentary system, which is increasingly proving itself to be a style of governance thoroughly unsuited to the modern era. Why we keep imposing parliamentary constitutions on struggling countries like Iraq when the same system has proven ineffective in our own nations is beyond me.
As I see it, the main problems with the parliamentary system — which is to say, a system where the executive branch of government is selected by and from the legislative branch, and held directly accountable to it — are threefold:
1) It’s elitist.
In order to form a government from the legislature, there needs to be hierarchical control of the parliament’s political parties through formal leadership structures. “Forming a government” from the largest parliamentary faction presumes that faction possesses a strong degree of unity, and usually the only way unity can be practically assured is through strong, centralized leadership. A single party leader and strong internal “party discipline” become necessary conditions to ensure everyone within the caucus is always supporting the same agenda, which is to say, propping up the government.
The independence of individual legislators has to be discouraged in such a system, because such independence would undermine the leadership’s ability to effectively manage the party’s pursuit or maintenance of power without distraction or dissent. The prime minister and the leader of the ruling party (offices which, in many countries, are held by the same person) will always hold excessive power in such a system, since their ability to lead the country flows from their ability to control their caucus. To undermine one mandate is to undermine the other. The omnipresent threats to the stability of the parliamentary system presented by confidence motions (see point #3) further encourages this culture of control.
Even when you have very diverse, multi-party parliaments there are still comparatively few politicians influencing the political process. It’s very difficult to negotiate a multi-party coalition government unless there are clearly recognized figures within each party who hold the ability to negotiate, and make decisions, unilaterally on their entire caucuses’ behalf. What all this means in practice is that a lot of parliamentary politics — especially the formation of the executive — is conducted at a very high, elite level that is rather far removed from the influence of individual legislators, and thus voters. The most important decisions will always be made by the party leaderships, with the legislators merely following behind obediently.
2) It undermines separation of powers.
The parliamentary system fuses executive and legislative power almost entirely. Since the executive by existing already controls the dominant faction of the legislature, the passage of the laws it wants become a forgone conclusion. The threat of losing the “confidence” of the legislature (again, see point #3) likewise ensures that the primarily function of the legislature becomes the “pushing through” of the executive’s agenda, rather than the genuine debate and analysis of it.
Similarly, because the parliamentary system forms the executive branch from the legislature, the legislature serves as an incubator of politicians with executive, rather than legislative ambitions. In other words, one frequently joins the parliament because one sees it as a path to joining the cabinet, rather than because one has a genuine interest in legislating. Hierarchical leadership structures (point #1) reward the loyalty of legislators with executive appointments down the line, which further discourages the emergence of a legislative branch capable of holding the government to practical account.
At best, the only tension in government becomes that between parties, which is ultimately far more petty and incidental to good government than the healthy institutional tension of accountability and review born from three independent branches of government with three independent purposes.
3) It promotes instability, and makes government confusing and unpredictable — as well as unaccountable
A key element of parliamentary governance is the idea that the executive can, at any time, be “defeated” by the legislature, which is to say dissolved by a vote of “no confidence.” (What exactly entails a no confidence vote can be interpreted quite liberally. Sometimes any failure to pass any bill is considered sufficient.) An effective no-confidence vote, in turn, either triggers an emergency legislative election, or the appointment of a new executive cobbled together from some new alliance of of parliamentary caucuses.
The latter is very clearly the worst of the two options; when an executive is deposed mid-term, and a new one appointed, it’s hard to argue how exactly any sort of democratic mandate is being fulfilled. This was the problem with the Canadian crisis of 2008. The three opposition parties (which is to say their leaders, see point #1) had simply decided amongst themselves to depose the incumbent executive and appoint themselves as its replacement. Who voted for this? Who wanted to be ruled by these people in this arrangement? It’s not clear at all. There was, in fact, no correlation of any sort between the sort of government Canada was poised to get, and what the voters of Canada understood themselves to have voted for. The parliamentary system simply asks voters to elect legislators, and then accept whatever random governing arrangement emerges from the results. There is no clear-cut cause and effect, no “by voting for this party I am helping elect this executive.” You can speculate as to what might be most plausible, but you never really know for sure.
Emergency elections are marginally better, in the sense they ask voters to cast ballots before a new (or same) executive is appointed to replace the one that has just been no-confidence voted. But such elections are often expensive exercises in pointless vanity and arrogance, forced upon the public for no reason other the party leaders’ refusal to cooperate. Confidence votes in fact discourage multi-partisan cooperation, as they provide a convenient escape hatch from the deadlock of obstinate attitudes. The same can be said for the executive’s right to dissolve the parliament unilaterally. Either way, the public interest in stable government is sacrificed for the sake of a never-ending partisan power-struggle, where elections and executive swaps are mere cards in the game, to be played when convenient.
A better system
The parliamentary system does some things right, of course. Lines of responsibility and accountability are generally quite clear, and when a strong executive is supported by a strong parliamentary majority, the government can rule very efficiently and effectively, and pursue sweeping or transformative legislation with few hurdles to slow things down. Sometimes that’s very important.
The concerns ultimately outweigh the positives, though. Assuming we all agree that excessive, stubborn partisanship and political manipulation of the electoral cycle are bad things, and stable, predictable, and co-operative government are good things, then it shouldn’t be too hard to conclude that the parliamentary system is by design a bad system of government, because it enshrines all the negative principles at the expense of the good ones.
It’s important to understand that the conventions and rules of the parliamentary system arose in the context of authoritarian monarchy, in which the highest executive authority of government, the head of state, was considered fairly illegitimate, and had to be manipulated and outsmarted through the tricks and tactics of the legislature. To this day the parliamentary system is basically concerned with executive/legislative relationships (or, in the modern era, executive/party leadership relations) rather than a voter/government relationships. Whatever worth there was in the previous focus, society has now outgrown it. Modern government is simply too big, and too involved in our lives to remain as distant from the direct control of the electorate as it was in the 19th Century, when most parliamentary practices were formulated.
If we’re to have a meaningful relationship with our government, and if that government is to retain legitimacy for its actions, then we really need a political system with much greater democratic accountability than the parliamentary model currently provides. It’s not to imply that every other model of government is somehow superior, but the fact that strained parliamentary regimes are clumsily lurching about on every continent of the world at present should give us at least a moment of pause.
I’ll write about my own alternatives sometime in the future.
October 5th, 2011 at 9:37 am
A great post, with painfully bad examples! Thanks!