Parliamentary sovereignty, the third majoritarian feature

Another majoritarian device, parliamentary sovereignty, is the principle that parliament (the legislature) is the ultimate authority for the political system.  Under parliamentary sovereignty, parliament can legislate on any matter it wishes and it can pass laws that command or prohibit anything it chooses.  There are no limits on the authority of parliament.   

To recap, a majoritarian form of government includes unicameralism and a fusion of legislative and executive power and parliamentary sovereignty.

The nonmajoritarian alternative to parliamentary sovereignty is a Constitution, sometimes called the Basic Law or the Fundamental Law (Germany) which sets limits on the power of government and allocates power (says what institutions can and cannot do and how they will operate).  The US Constitution is the ultimate authority in the United States and it limits Congress, the president, the courts, and all other US institutions in what they can do. 

Note that no basic or fundamental law like the US Constitution can set out all the details about how the government game will be played, and so all political systems have ordinary laws and traditions and understandings that regulate political life.  (Shively [2005: 205-206] uses the helpful idea of a Big-C constitution and little-c constitution to make the point.)  Obviously, political parties play a big role in the democratic governments of the United States and Britain--the first of which has a big-C Constitution, the second of which does not, but both of which have small-c constitutions. To take just one example in each case: parties in the US run candidates for the presidency, and so the party's candidate who has an absolute majority of Electoral College votes becomes president; in Britain the majority party's leader becomes prime minister.  Political parties are not explicitly mentioned in the US Constitution and, of course, Britain doesn't have a big-C Constitution, so in both case one has to look at the small-c constitution to understand these institutions.  The difference is that in a  state with a Constitution (big-C), that fundamental document trumps all.

In some nonmajoritarian systems, like the United States, the courts exercise judicial review, which is the power of courts to declare an act of the legislature or an act of the executive unconstitutional, as a violation of the Constitution, and therefore void.  As such, one of the functions of the courts in these systems is to interpret the Constitution and to assess whether governmental acts are consistent with the Constitution.  Obviously, courts can only undertake judicial review, to hear challenges as to the constitutionality of government acts, if there is a Constitution (big-C) to use as a standard.  (So, where there is parliamentary sovereignty--as, for example, in Britain--no act of parliament can be unconstitutional, and courts do not have the power to void acts of parliament.)  In some political systems, the Constitution explicitly provides for the power of judicial review, as for example in the creation of the Conseil Constitutionnel (Constitutional Council) in France, but the US Constitution makes no such provision; there is judicial review in the US because the Supreme Court asserted the constitutional power in Marbury v Madison (1803).

And, now, on to the fourth majoritarian feature, unitary government...