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Fusion of legislative and executive power, the second
majoritarian feature
In a majoritarian system, there is a fusion of power between
the legislature and the executive. This fusion of power is commonly known
as a parliamentary system. In such a parliamentary system, the chief
executive--the British Prime Minister, the Prime Minister of Israel, the
Bundeskanzler (Federal Chancellor) of Germany--comes to power based on the
support of one or more political parties in the legislature which provide an
absolute majority of votes to support and maintain that chief executive in
power. If one party has an absolute majority of seats in the legislature,
its party leader becomes prime minister and, with the heads of the departments
(ministers) that he appoints from his party, a cabinet is formed. The
cabinet--Prime Minister and other ministers--make up the Government of the
Day.
In the
2005 elections, the Labour Party in Great Britain won an absolute
majority of seats in the House of Commons (356 out of 646), and so Labour's
party leader, Tony Blair, became Prime Minister; Blair appointed various
other Labour members of the House of Commons to ministerial positions, and
together they make up the Government of the Day.
A fundamental principle of parliamentary government is
that the Government of the Day must have the
confidence
of parliament. In other words it must at all times be able to claim
the support of an absolute majority of members of the parliament. The
Government of the Day will have the confidence of parliament so long as one
party has an absolute majority of seats (which will occur so long as there
are only two parties in parliament, something that should result if SMDP,
the majoritarian electoral law, is used) and members of parliament
vote along party lines, exhibiting what is
called
party discipline.
In the British case, on all matters Labour Party members of Parliament (MPs)
vote in favor of bills put forward by its party leaders (Blair and others)
who make up the Government of the Day. (MCs from other parties, the
Opposition, will oppose these motions but without effect; because the
Government's party has an absolute majority of seats, it wins every vote.)
If, on the other hand, enough MCs from the Government's party defect and
vote against their party leader, Government bills will go down to defeat,
the Government will have lost the confidence of parliament, and will resign,
in which case it is said the Government has fallen. When the
Government falls, there may be a dissolution of parliament, in which case
all MPs will lose their positions, and will have to run to regain their
seats in new elections. (Wikipedia has a helpful discussion of the
motion of
confidence.)
In the event a parliamentary system uses a
nonmajoritarian electoral law--which would render the system as a whole
not majoritarian--it may well be that no one party has an absolute
majority of seats in parliament, with the result that a
coalition
government will be formed based on a temporary agreement of two or more
parties to cooperate to form a Government of the Day. There will
still be a fusion of legislative and executive power so long as the MPs
from the parties in the coalition maintain party discipline and support
the government.
Because the Government of the Day is based on control of a
majority of seats in parliament and because MCs from the government
party vote in every instance to support the Government, legislative and
executive power are linked, are fused, moving together in an interlocking
fashion.
Recall that this fusion of legislative and executive power is
a majoritarian feature; if there is a majoritarian form of government, there
will be a fusion of legislative and executive power and
unicameralism.
A nonmajoritarian
alternative to a fusion of legislative and executive power is separation
of powers where the legislative and executive branches operate with a
greater degree of independence from each other. An obvious example of
separation of powers is the United States where the president is elected
separately from members of Congress; occupies the office for a four year term
whether or not members of Congress support his policies; and may be faced with
one or both houses of Congress under the majority control of the opposition
party. From the congressional perspective, in this separation of powers,
the two chambers may pass bills opposed by the president, but he may choose to
block them by exercising his veto (which may be overridden only by two-thirds
majorities in both the House and the Senate). Essentially, the Congress
does its thing, the president does his thing, and only if those things happen to
be the same will anything get done.
Here is a good
time to make another point. While a majoritarian system will have all
of the majoritarian features exactly as they have been set out, there is not
one specific set of nonmajoritarian alternatives. (This is why in the
previous paragraph I wrote "A nonmajoritarian alternative...."
There may be several nonmajoritarian alternatives to a particular
majoritarian feature.) The French case shows this. France
also has a parliamentary system in which the premier, equivalent to a
prime minister, and her cabinet can stay in power only so long as it has a
parliamentary majority (that is, is backed by an absolute majority of the
members of the National Assembly, the dominant house of the French bicameral
legislature). On the other hand, there is also a president of
France who is elected independently of members of the National Assembly and
who has some specific powers, especially in foreign affairs. This is
clearly nonmajoritarian but it also differs from the US separation of
powers. This aspect of French nonmajoritarianism is sometimes referred
to as a hybrid model, but that suggests it is somewhere between the British
and US cases which I don't think is a very good way to look at things.
It's French. Another term used for the French and similar cases is
semipresidentialism.
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