With the results of the recent Iraqi election coming in, it just occurs to me that seemingly all fledgling democracies follow a parliamentary model. Has anyone copied our system? I know there are places that have “presidents,” but I’m not sure that they’re particularly faithful to our model in anything else, including separation of powers.
23 thoughts on “What’s Wrong With Us?”
Comments are closed.
The government of the Republic of the Philippines was modeled on our structure – House of Representatives and Senate, President as head of state and of executive branch, independent judiciary with a Supreme Court.
We sent a bunch of academics to help the Iraqis draft their new constitution.
Naturally academics hate the American system of government, because it is American, and believe that parliamentary systems with proportional representation are better, because they are European.
The story of the Japanese Constitution,parliamentary yet written largely by two US army officers who did not hate America, is interesting. Left out of the wikipedia article (click on my name for it) is this story:
“Atomic Sunshine” was a nickname given to the conference that created the new Constitution of Japan, which was held by General Courtney Whitney of GHQ, Shigeru Yoshida (Prime Minister of Japan from 1947), Jiro Shirasu (translator) and Jyoji Matsumoto, the minister of Department of State who was in charge of creating the new Japanese Constitution, on February 13, 1946. General Whitney turned down Matsumoto’s conservative Constitution scheme, and explained that the GHQ’s version of the Japanese Constitution scheme was a definitive plan which embodied Japan’s current needs for principles, and that it was already approved by General MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of GHQ. Then the American group came down to the garden of the American official’s residence and gave the Japanese group the time to read out the English version. When Jiro Shirasu, who was fluent in English, came out to the garden and joined the American group, Whitney said to Shirasu, “We have been enjoying your atomic sunshine.”
part 2:
This comment by General Whitney has made it clear to the Japanese who was the winner and loser of the war, and remarked that accepting the provisions stipulated in the GHQ draft will be the best way to keep the Emperor “secure”, and if the Japanese government does not accept this plan, then General MacArthur is ready to propose this plan directly to the Japanese people. This conference to create the new Constitution later came to be called the “Atomic Sunshine Conference.” Based on this GHQ plan, Japanese cabinet created the amendment plan, and it was proclaimed as new Japanese Constitution on November 3rd, 1946.
From: http://spikyart.org/atomicsunshine/ny/atomicsunshineexhibitione.html but I’ve heard the same story lots of places.
Rand, you might find the international comparisons here interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers
The Framers had the example of the British Parliament to work with and it wasn’t a very good example. Parliament had run roughshod over American objections to laws on taxes and trade and was really run by a corrupt cabel.
Also the smaller states wanted something to offset the influence of the larger states so they came up with the idea of a bicameral legislature, with the lower House elected by the people in proportion to their numbers and the upper House selected by the state legislatures. Worked rather well until the 17th Amendment.
That explains why we did what we did. It doesn’t explain why other nations didn’t do something similar. Particularly when it resulted in the greatest nation in world history to date, in terms of wealth and power.
It also doesn’t explain why those running it currently want to emulate other nations, and run it into the ground.
Because our system is good for the nation but not so good for those in charge. The drive to change it is, IMHO, driven almost entirely by self interest of those who would be our new ruling class.
Switzerland has a strong Federal system as well.
Has anyone copied our system? I know there are places that have “presidents,” but I’m not sure that they’re particularly faithful to our model in anything else, including separation of powers.
Most Latin American constitutions are modeled on the US example.
In conversations with foreigners three things stand out about what they don’t like about the US model – 1) fixed terms for the head of government, 2) excessive judicial power, and 3) winner-take-all election model that heavily favors two party system.
Most Latin American constitutions are modeled on the US example.
Then I guess it was poorly implemented. Probably because of a flawed (i.e, non-Anglospheric) political culture.
Ironically, those are three of the big items I don’t like about our system, too.
Most countries, Rand, don’t actually pay attention to their constitutions. We were, until recently, an exception. I guess in that sense we’re just joining the rest of the world. (A bad idea, but we’ve had a lot of those over the last 100 years or so.)
“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is
wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts
they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions,
it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. …
And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not
warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as
to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost
in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure.”
The tree of liberty is long overdue for fertilizer.
Australia has a House of Representatives modeled on the British Parliament and a Senate based on the US system.
Yeah, it doesn’t work very well either.
Most of these countries were monarchies or colonies of monarchies (with viceroys or governors-general replacing the monarch for all practical purposes.) You can’t easily have a US-style presidential system with a monarch as head of state, but you can have a system where the head of state is a figurehead and the real political power is held by someone else, and the latter is basically the parliamentary system. Iraq was once a constitutional monarchy with a parliament, IIRC, so they are just going back to what they knew.
Incidentally, I’m told that at the time of Confederation the Canadians thought seriously about adopting a presidential government, but decided against it because they wanted the head of state to be a non-partisan ceremonial figure. The great advantage of a ceremonial head of state is that it allows the country to select a useless nonentity as a feel-good gesture without destroying the nation.
In the US system, the President is basically an elected king. Madison took the powers he thought the king should have (basically, “execute the laws”) and gave them to a guy he called a President. Madison assumed that the Congress would be the more powerful branch.
In systems that already had a king, this “create a king” bit wasn’t necessary, and the political goal was to take power from the king. Also, modern history (which Madison didn’t have the benefit of) has shown that splitting the US President’s job in two parts leads to less Presidential mischief and more efficient governments.
I mean, imagine Prime Minister Pelosi trying to get health care passed. Or, Prime Minister Gingrich and his platform. But that only works if you have either a single house of Congress or a very weak upper house.
@Jim:
1. The alternative to fixed terms, under the parliamentary system, involves allowing the leader of the governing party to call snap elections any time he feels like it. I’m not convinced this is an improvement.
2. If you are going to have a consitution that is enforced against the executive and legislature, then you are going to have a strong judicial branch. You may disguise it as an “office of the ombudsman” or a “controlling Yuan” if you like, but it will in fact be a Supreme Court substantially similar to the SCOTUS. Parliamentary systems typically evade “excessive” judicial power by making it impossible for citizens to sue the government when their rights are violated.
3. The other nations of the Anglosphere have parliamentary systems of various types, and they all have something similar to the two party system. (Canada’s has the strongest smaller parties, but even there it was been over a century since the head of government was from any party other than the Liberals or whatever the Conservatives are calling themselves this year.)
Four simple words: “Vote of no confidence.”
One democracy got its current constitution in 1958 and chose a bicameral legislature and a strong president: France.
Mr. Gerrib,
I’d disagree with your interpretation of the President as an elected king. A great deal of effort was put into 1. acceding to the necessity of having a single executive, like a Prime Minister or a king, but 2. explicitly not having an elected king.
I suspect that the reason we elected the chief executive by a vote of the people (more or less), rather than a vote of the legislature (like a parliamentary system) is because we recognized that parliamentary systems always “happen” to elect one of their own to the position, even if it isn’t required, but the skills for such a position are different from the skills of a representative to a deliberative body. The role of the American President was envisioned similar to the CEOs of today: professional managers that are not the principal leaders of the nation. Congress was supposed to do that; Presidents were supposed to execute according to what they were told. Parliamentary systems always elect the leader of the majority party to the Prime Minister position. Corporate Boards of Directors typically are made up of people that don’t want the management position; legislatures don’t have that distinction.
There was a great deal of copying of the US system in Latin America after independence, but without a tradition of self-government from the bottom up it never worked as intended. I think that by the end of the 19th century it was regarded as something that didn’t export very well. The Swiss did copy the federal stricture of the US after 1849 and it had worked well; in fact, it’s a better example today of what the founders had intended than the current US system. And the Swiss militia system is a good example of what the Founders meant by “a well-regulated militia”. Of course the Swiss had the history of local self-government, too.
The US Constitution draws on three main examples — the British constitution as it operated then, for the balance of powers (Montesquieu got the idea of balance of powers by observing Britain, after all); the colonial legislatures; and the Instrument of Government, which was the constitution of Cromwell’s Commonwealth. The copied the latter on such matters as short, fixed terms for the lower house, a broad franchise, and regular reapportionments, which they saw as a guard against the sort of corruption and misrepresentation they had seen in Parliament.
Judicial review had been in Common Law legal theory from the time of Blackstone and before. The British Privy Council had exercised judicial review over colonial law before the revolution; it could overturn statutes that were “repugnant to Common Law”. The Supreme Court in many ways merely moved this function from London to Washington.
I think the lesson of the attempts at imitating the US constitutional structure is that structures don’t mean squat unless the population has experience in self-government and maintains the will to make it work. You can have the most perfect wiring diagram in the world but unless the juice is on you have nothing.
I suspect that the reason we elected the chief executive by a vote of the people (more or less)
Actually, fortunately, we still elect the chief executive by a vote of the states (the electoral college), despite the desire of many to further destroy the Republic by abolishing it.
Keep in mind, Rand, that the “winner take all” rule that most states use to cast their electoral votes is not required by the Constitution, but emerged as a result of pragmatic politics. The framers probably expected it to result in electoral votes cast in approximate proportion to the voters’ desires with a slight bias toward the states’ desires, which is what we would have if all states followed Maine’s method of awarding most votes by congressional district. Nobody thought it was perfect but was a great improvement over letting the legislature choose the executive.