The Parliamentary and Presidential Forms of Government - Essay Example

07 November 2007 The Parliamentary and Presidential forms of Government The system of government has a great impact on the political relations within the country and its foreign affairs. The system of government determines allocation of power and sets specific roles to political institutions. The Parliamentary and Presidential forms of government are the most popular today. Statute as a power of the political leaders is limited by the rule of law. The government itself must act under law: its will is not irresponsible and arbitrary. In both systems, a central aspect of the pluralization of politics is dispersion of power. "Parliamentary systems are typified by a fusion of powers between the legislative and executive branches. The Prime Minister (who is the chief executive) may be elected to the legislature in the same way that all other members are elected" (Governing Systems and Executive-Legislative Relations n.d.). Power in Parliamentary systems is concentrated in the Parliamentary leaders. It follows that pressure groups, to promote their interests, must influence the leaders, and this they can do effectively only by putting pressure on them directly or by acting through agencies that can, above all the parties and civil servants. Parliament, of course, also has some influence with its leaders, hence it is not entirely useless for British pressure groups to try to influence Prime Ministers (Mettenhiem 27). But compared to the pressures exerted through parties and civil servants their parliamentary activities are secondary. For instance, the need to focus pressure on the bureaucrats is reinforced by the activities of British government. First, the vast scope and technical character of decision-making required by welfare-state policies has led to the devolution of more and more decision-making authority to the bureaucracy, so that there is in Britain a vast amount of executive legislation (Ben-Zion Kaminsky 221). Equally important, the decision-making powers delegated to the Departments are likely to be of special concern to interest groups (Lijphart 129). General policy, of course, is still predominantly made by the Government, but technical details, especially the sort needing fairly frequent revisions (e.g., how much money is to be paid to doctors; what prices to guarantee to the farmers; on what basis to grant or withhold licenses to build, import, issue securities or acquire raw materials), are taken care of by the Departments, and such details are likely to be of as great concern to interest groups as policy in its broad sense (Mettenhiem 29). In contrast to Parliamentary systems, where the P.M is a party leader, the President is chosen by a separate election. "The President then appoints his or her cabinet of ministers (or "secretaries" in US parlance). Ministers/Secretaries usually are not simultaneously members of the legislature, although their appointment may require the advice and consent of the legislative branch" (Governing Systems and Executive-Legislative Relations n.d.). In this view, the constitutional separation of the executive and the legislature is the main culprit in the now excessive fractionizing of governmental power. Following Lijphart (1992): "the notion of the supremacy of parliament as a whole over its parts is a distinctive characteristic of parliamentary systems" (37). The main differences between the Parliamentary and Presidential forms of government are found in separation of power (Lijphart 16). In general, the Presidential form stipulates separation of power between different branches while the Parliamentary form means a fusion of power. In both forms, corporatism is characterized by high concentrations of government power as well as private power (Ben-Zion Kaminsky 221). Pluralism, on the other hand, is based on low concentrations of government and private power. A state-directed system is characterized by high concentration of government power, and low concentration of private power. And, finally, high concentration of private power and low concentration of government power condition private government. "The Prime Minister appoints Cabinet Ministers. However, unlike in the presidential systems, these members are typically themselves legislative members from the ruling party or ruling coalition" (Governing Systems and Executive-Legislative Relations n.d.). The President holds the position of the state of the government and the head of the state. In the Parliamentary, these positions are held by two different persons. To make effective use of what is potentially an important administration position, the president should have the chairman attend and participate in cabinet meetings. He should as well designate the chairman as the administration's principal liaison officer with the Republican congressional leadership. With his credibility thus enhanced, the national chairman could articulate convincingly the administration's interest in party rebuilding, while the resources gained from giving the party more coherence could be employed almost immediately to advance passage of the administration's programs. For instance, the practical importance of a president of the United States legitimizing the strengthening of the party role in the governing process can scarcely be overstated. The United States badly needs an unequivocal presidential endorsement of a carefully developed and continuously pursued program to reinvigorate its representative institutions (Lijphart 17). The stakes are particularly great for President Reagan, faced with the need to control the federal budget, which has gone out of control in the grips of the special interests groups that have filled the vacuum left by the decline of parties. Rebuilding the party, therefore, will be an indispensable step in fulfilling his policy objectives. The President served a fixed term while the head of the government serves an indefinite term. The first step in the constitution of a Cabinet is the appointment of a Prime Minister, who in turn appoints the other Cabinet members and non-Cabinet ministers. For instance, in Great Britain the appointment of the Prime Minister is one of the few remaining functions of the sovereign that are of any importance, although this power too is so limited by convention as to be almost an empty formality. The general rule is that the Queen must appoint whatever leader is capable of commanding the support of a majority in Parliament (Lijphart 60). In contrast to Presidential form, the partisan groups in parliament established parliamentary party groups which make up the linkage between mass suffrage, parties and parliaments, and are today generally accepted as necessary instruments of parliamentary system. This view of parties as a stabilizing force within parliament has recently been rediscovered-in a theoretical application to democratic procedures in the US-as the impact of structural constraints on the otherwise limitless opportunities for legislative instability. According to Lijphart (1992): Parliamentary theory implies that the second phase of constitutional development, in which the assembly and judiciary claim their own areas of jurisdiction alongside the executive, shall give way to a third in which assembly and government are fused in a parliament. Presidential theory on the other hand requires the assembly to remain separate as in the second phase" (40). Parliamentary committees are crucial to the functioning of the Parliament. Government bills and reports as well as private members' bills are first handled by standing committees. The committees prepare recommendations to the Parliament. Each recommendation may be unanimous or contain dissenting remarks and alternative proposals put forward by majority as well as minority factions. The main weakness of the Parliamentary system is political instability of Cabinets. In this case, the principal advantage enjoyed by British government over most other Parliamentary systems is the stability of its cabinets. Since the turn of the entury Britain has had one cabinet for every five or six in France, despite the fact that British governments, no less than French, can be deposed by adverse votes of confidence in the legislature or simply by defeats on policy. This stability of Presidential form has a great many desirable results. It enables ministers to learn the ropes of governing (no easy task in this age of highly technical legislation); it prevents excessively abrupt changes in policy (Mettenhiem 42). On such occasions there will be a certain amount of cross-voting in Parliament. The system works with such consistency that it is not unusual for an M.P. to criticize his party in a Parliamentary debate and later to vote with it in the actual "division," although party discipline, rigidly applied, demands not only a member's vote but also his silence, or sometimes, indeed, his public support of policies with which he privately disagrees (Lijphart 153-154). Parties can also have a vital role in the nomination process. At the presidential level, the party roles could be strengthened by requiring that a substantial portion of national convention delegates -- perhaps one-third -- be chosen wholly outside the primaries in their capacities as party officials and officeholders. All of the following might be made voting delegates ex officio: each U.S. senator of the party, each member of the House of Representatives, each governor, the party's national chairman and cochairman, each member of the national committee, and the chairman and vice chairman of each state party. The total number of ex officio delegates to the two national conventions would thus be on the order of 1,100 to 1,200. With such specific acknowledgement of the formal role of their leaders, the political parties would acquire new vigor (Mettenhiem 43). Conscious and reflective planning by the party would again be possible in the selection process. This constructive change in presidential nominee selection can be made, it should be noted, by the Republican and Democratic national parties themselves, without any legislative action whatsoever (Shugart 632). Present defects in what government does, the president should point out, result from defects in the way in which it does its work. Congress cannot function properly without the integrative mechanisms of party. Without the capacity for integration that parties can so well provide, the president and Congress cannot cope successfully with the dispersal of power which distinguishes the U.S. government (Mettenhiem 23). The public at large can exercise proper control over political leadership only through more disciplined parties -- when governmental decision-making is made less individualistic, more coherent, and more unified. The president has a responsibility to help strengthen the party system generally as part of the machinery of representative democracy, but he has a special responsibility and unique resources as leader of the Republican Party (Mettenhiem 25). Dispersion of public power is manifested in various ways the Parliamentary form. Naturally, single party majority governments, that is, the Norwegian Labor governments, represent a high concentration of government power. Minority governments and government coalitions, on the other hand, have to share power with opposition parties in parliament (Shugart 632). The strengthening of the Parliament in relation to the executive represents a dispersion of public power most clearly demonstrated by the increased frequency of governmental defeat in parliamentary voting. Other kinds of response to the dispersion of public power are negotiations with opposition parties in order to establish parliamentary majorities, and the adaptations that governments make in their policy proposals in order to meet anticipated reactions in parliament (Mettenhiem 53). Successful negotiations and adaptations are less likely if the number of parties is high and the pattern of conflict and cleavages complicated (Ben-Zion Kaminsky 221). The strengths of the Presidential form is that in order to provide the Government with a normal means of escaping this danger, the President's power of appointing to high administrative office has been expanded, as has his role in negotiating treaties and international agreements, again in case parliament blocks the action of the Government. If conflict between parliament and the Prime Minister persists, or if for any reason he sees fit, the President has the discretionary right to dissolve the assembly at any time after its first year, and this on his own decision and with no condition required other than consulting the Prime Minister and the presiding officers of parliament (Lijphart 43-44). Short of the threat of dissolution, the President can urge cooperation on parliament as well as place directly before it his personal views, by means of written messages that are read for him to both houses. The President has the constitution right to submit legislation directly to the people in a referendum. Thus, usually on the proposal of the Government (but by joint resolution of parliament in the rare case it is the Government that is judged to be in "error"), the President can ask for popular approval or disapproval of a law or international agreement that he judges to have the effect of seriously changing the constitutional order (Mettenhiem 94). In less serious cases of infringement on this order, he can ask that a bill be reviewed by the new Constitutional Council, which is empowered to declare it unconstitutional. Thus the administration of the Community, including control over the areas of "common" interest, is directly under the President. For instance, in France it was he who convoked the Executive Council, presided over its meetings, made the decisions on the common matters between its quarterly sessions, and in substance ultimately handled all major policy problems for the African governments (Mettenhiem 94). The main weakness of the Parliamentary form is political diversity of the parties. In contrast, the Presidential form allows to concentrate power of the main parties and interest groups. It is therefore on the departmental level, where everything is less "visible," less exposed to public scrutiny, than on the parliamentary level, that the bulk of British pressure-group politics takes place. Interest groups do not make nearly so much use of Parliament as they did when it was a much more important place (Strm et al 56). But Parliament is not yet totally in eclipse and the fact that interest groups still find it worthwhile to exert some pressure on it is itself evidence of this. Many British associations, for example, make use of Parliamentary Agents: law firms specializing in parliamentary business and hired by interest groups to scrutinize bills and Regulations, to draft bills and amendments for submission to Ministers and private members, and, in general, to keep an eye out for the group in the House (Strm et al 56). Another weakness of the Parliamentary system is that the party leaders still tend to dominate the party machines, however much the development of the organized mass parties has cut into their former independence. And they dominate the machine not because they are "bosses but just because they are parliamentary notables (Strm et al 345). This indicates that even the present party system, however much the product of democratization, has its roots firmly in the pre-democratic past. And this is true not only of the Conservative Party, which has a very long history, but even of the Labor Party, which came into being just at the turn of the century. Appropriately enough, the dominance of the parliamentarians over party conventions and officials is greater in the former than the latter, but the similarities between them are perhaps even more important than the differences. "Opposition parties theoretically want to maximize their power in a system dominated by the majority by voting as a block and squelching internal dissent" (Governing Systems and Executive-Legislative Relations, n.d.). The main weakness of the Presidential form is that two he occupies main positions of head of government and head of state. The President now enjoys a series of new disciplinary powers also tending to expedite debate and limit parliamentary prerogative. Nowhere more certainly than under the conception of statute as the expression of the general will through the representative legislature does the traditional doctrine of sovereignty manifest its strength. "The problem of executive-legislative conflict, which may turn into 'deadlock' and 'paralysis', is the inevitable result of the co-existence of the two independent organs that presidential government creates and that may be in disagreement" (Lijphart 15). Thus, with the President going one way, and Congress balking, or actually going in another, the difficulties that he in the way of getting a responsible "administration" are the chief concerns of our contemporary politics in the United States. Under modern conditions of politically responsible government the program sanctioned by a majority constitutionally agreed upon remains the only "will" that can be politically arrived at. Unsatisfactory as it undoubtedly is from many points of view, it remains also the best working compromise for securing stable government, when the rights of minorities to consideration are given the proper safeguards. Law exists to assure these, and to compromise conflicts that are in the nature of things inevitable, in accordance with principles of justice which are no respecters of persons, even if those "persons" be powerful corporate groups (Lijphart 16-17). If these groups are politically able to change laws, there is better ground for believing their cases are just than if they attempt to exploit economic power through direct action. "Instead of the Parliamentary convention or law whereby the same persons may be part of both the executive and legislative branches of government, it is customary in presidential states for the personnel to be separate. Neither the President nor his aides may sit in the US Congress" (Lijphart 43). The point is often made that, as a matter of fact, constitutional government under modern conditions is no longer so much a matter of separate expressions in each act of a popular mandate (as the intellectualist construction of representative expression of a general will assumed) but a matter of expert administration and formation of policies under a mandate of popular confidence. And up to a point that is quite true. France has finally awakened to the organic necessity of setting her finances in order (Strm et al 335). The powers granted to ministry were willingly given at last. A mandate to experts is, indeed, what the co-organic theory would lead us to expect wherever the community purpose has found articulate means of expression. The other advantage and strengths of the Presidency is that the post of a President as often seen as guardian of the national interest has a positive impact on foreign policy and relations (Lijphart 173). These matters included foreign affairs, national defense, relations with the Community and other former dependencies and to deal with them he created a special policy-making process centered in the office. For each of the subjects the President has a special assistant on his personal staff who prepares background papers for personal use and serves as liaison with the ministerial department concerned. In sum, the Parliamentary and Presidential forms of government have strengths and weakness. Thus, both of these form exercise democratic control and ensure political stability. The state is a sprawling organization within society that coexists with many other formal and informal social organizations. The role of the political system, Presidential or Parliamentary, is to make the binding rules guiding people's behavior or, at the very least, to authorize particular other organizations to make those rules in certain realms. They involve the entire array of property rights and any of the other countless definitions of the boundaries delineating acceptable behavior for people. Bibliography 1. Ben-Zion Kaminsky, E. On the Comparison of Presidential and Parliamentary Governments. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 27 (1997): 221. 2. Governing Systems and Executive-Legislative Relations . n.d. 2007. 3. Lijphart, A. Parliamentary versus Presidential Government. Oxford University Press, 1992. 4. von Mettenhiem. Presidential Institutions and Democratic Politics ohn Hopkins University Press, 1996. 5. Presidential versus Parliamentary System of Government. N.d. 2007 6. Strm, K., Muller, W.C., Bergman, T. Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies. Oxford University Press, 2003. 7. Shugart, M.S. Elections: The American Process of Selecting a President A Comparative Perspective. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 34 (2004): 632. Read More