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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 office, 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).
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