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[Sergarr]

Why shouldn't the parliament be the rubber stamp for a ruling party?

[Sheb]

Sergarr, no offense, but that's such a Russian question. The idea of a parliament is not that you have elections and then whoever won them can do what he wants: in that case, you might as well dispense with it and have the ministers rule by decree. The idea of a parliament is to provide a place where law can be discussed, amended and then voted on.

[aenri]

Why shouldn't the parliament be the rubber stamp for a ruling party?

I dislike it from theoretical standpoint of separation of powers. By and large it means in parliamentary systems that whoever controls legislative (the parliament) controls also the executive (government). The other side of the coin is that government (precisely prime minister/equivalent and ministers) is responisible for its actions to parliament, but that control power of parliament is moot when both of the branches of power are controlled by the same party (coalition).

[Sergarr]

Why shouldn't the parliament be the rubber stamp for a ruling party?

I dislike it from theoretical standpoint of separation of powers. By and large it means in parliamentary systems that whoever controls legislative (the parliament) controls also the executive (government). The other side of the coin is that government (precisely prime minister/equivalent and ministers) is responisible for its actions to parliament, but that control power of parliament is moot when both of the branches of power are controlled by the same party (coalition).

No, I mean - the ruling party has the support of the majority, and in democracy, that means they have the right to decide for everybody.

Why shouldn't they be allowed to do that, if they have more than 50% support from population?

[Frumple]

... they usually don't have support of over 50% of the population. Just a majority of voters... if that. Voter turnout is a thing.

[Sergarr]

... they usually don't have support of over 50% of the population. Just a majority of voters... if that. Voter turnout is a thing.

The problem with specialized parliaments is delimitation of power as Sheb mentioned. Who distributes issues to parliaments and what if they cannot agree on which parliament should vote for issue?

In my opinion parliaments in classic parliamentary systems are nothing but a rubber stamps for ruling party policies. If some party has over 50% of MPs, they can do anything they want and no one can really stop them. On the other hand if there are many small parties, they cannot pass anything in parliament if the big party says no.

I thought having over 50% of MPs meant having over 50% of popular support?

And people who don't go to vote are not being forced to not go to vote, you know.

[aenri]

Why shouldn't the parliament be the rubber stamp for a ruling party?

I dislike it from theoretical standpoint of separation of powers. By and large it means in parliamentary systems that whoever controls legislative (the parliament) controls also the executive (government). The other side of the coin is that government (precisely prime minister/equivalent and ministers) is responisible for its actions to parliament, but that control power of parliament is moot when both of the branches of power are controlled by the same party (coalition).

No, I mean - the ruling party has the support of the majority, and in democracy, that means they have the right to decide for everybody.

Why shouldn't they be allowed to do that, if they have more than 50% support from population?

Yeah what Frumple said, they absolutely don't have support of majority of voters, let alone population. It could be as few as 20% of voters (some funny FPTP voting systems).

[Sergarr]

Why shouldn't the parliament be the rubber stamp for a ruling party?

I dislike it from theoretical standpoint of separation of powers. By and large it means in parliamentary systems that whoever controls legislative (the parliament) controls also the executive (government). The other side of the coin is that government (precisely prime minister/equivalent and ministers) is responisible for its actions to parliament, but that control power of parliament is moot when both of the branches of power are controlled by the same party (coalition).

No, I mean - the ruling party has the support of the majority, and in democracy, that means they have the right to decide for everybody.

Why shouldn't they be allowed to do that, if they have more than 50% support from population?

Yeah what Frumple said, they absolutely don't have support of majority of voters, let alone population. It could be as few as 20% of voters (some funny FPTP voting systems).

That's ridiculous.

[aenri]

That's ridiculous.

Consider this example:
2 electoral districts with 1 seat each
in each of them you have 10 candidates and in both electoral districts 500 people vote.
If in both districts candidate from the same party wins with 100 votes, because all other candidates will have less votes (totaling 500) they will have 100% of parliament (2 seats) with only 20% (200 votes from 1000) voters voting for them.
This is FPTP in purest form.

I can try to search for some real world examples, but you will need to wait, because I was researching this a long time ago and don't remember the specifics.


EDIT : Okay this is it - Kenyan national elections from the year 1992 where Kenya African National Union won 100 seats from 188 (53% a majority) with only 1,327,691 votes from 5,486,768 (that is 24.5% of total).

[WarRoot]

No, I mean - the ruling party has the support of the majority, and in democracy, that means they have the right to decide for everybody.

Why shouldn't they be allowed to do that, if they have more than 50% support from population?

I guess classical greek democracy worked that way but we have moved away from that.
The reason why they shouldn't be allowed to do that is to prevent the tyranny of the majority over the minority.

[BlindKitty]

So how would the executive be elected?

Good question! So far I have three answers:

1. In more presidential - oriented places the president would be solely responsible for nominating ministers; of course, president would be elected by popular vote in this scenario. He would be effectively *the* executive branch.
2. If the relation between executive and legislative is L has_many E (so, no crossing of cabinet boundaries for ministers), they could be elected by cabinets, which would lead to some problems (similar to what we have today).
3. They could be elected by the general population one-by-one (which is very problematic, given that we are moving in the regions of 50 separate votes to be cast by every voter).

This really depends on what we think about executives: if their power is limited, the 1. might be the best response, as it would limit the presidential power while still giving him some leeway. I actually believe that option 3. would be the best, but it is rather utopic, as I said, given the sheer amount of voting people would be presented with.

There is also option 4, now that I think of it:
4. A group of at least 20 (or 15, or 40, or some similar number) people can nominate their representative to vote for executives in their name. This person carries with his vote the weight of all the people who vested their power in him, but no more than 100 (to avoid strange shenanigans), but only for the duration of this one vote. This allows less active voters to still cast their vote, and due to low threshold like-minded people can agree beforehand to a list and just send one of them to vote in their behalf. It could be especially effective if a voter knows somebody who has similar political considerations, but doesn't want to personally sift through all available candidates to choose the best ones, and leaves that in hands of somebody more active, but trusted.

[Sergarr]

No, I mean - the ruling party has the support of the majority, and in democracy, that means they have the right to decide for everybody.

Why shouldn't they be allowed to do that, if they have more than 50% support from population?

I guess classical greek democracy worked that way but we have moved away from that.
The reason why they shouldn't be allowed to do that is to prevent the tyranny of the majority over the minority.

There's nothing that can prevent the tyranny of the majority over the minority unless there's a majority inside the majority which is against the tyranny anyways.

Artificial barriers will not stop the majority that is for tyranny from tyrannizing over minorities, unless the minorities somehow get into power, in which case, you've a revolution in the works.

[Sheb]

You haven't look at the US Senate recently, have you?

[MonkeyHead]

Well, the US political system is set up to prevent large population centres controlling the political process, though does this by rather crudely amplifying the power of sparse regions.

[Sergarr]

Which leads into minority (the old men who thinks 50s was the best time ever) tyranning over the majority (everybody else).

Great job, everyone!