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[smigenboger]

I am Smigenboger before I am an American Civilian.

It really comes down to either associating with the local government (The US), moving to another place with a local government, directly challenging a local government (in this case, my buddies and I vs. the entire US government/army), or striking out for some barren wasteland no government has claimed).

Aside from living in parts of South America, Africa, or maybe Antarctica, adopting the US form of government (or any other major government) and it's flaws would be better than not having it.

Although with perhaps a hundred or so people, you may be able to colonize a section of Antarctica if you have some type of good production exporting. It would be a free life of a very specialized trade

[Aqizzar]

Well, I'm glad to hear you all being quite reasonable.  Sorry about getting so hostile, and accusing you of something you banter you weren't really doing.  I'm instinctively conditioned to assumed every discussion of politics on the Internet will turn into hollow America-bashing after a dozen posts, so I have a bit of a hair-trigger.

In order to pass bills, a variety of random political nonsense has to be gone through before a public vote is held in the House of Commons.  If this is passed with a majority (pro-tip - due to the First Past the Post system, the government wins 99% of the time) it moves to the House of Lords.

The House of Lords is a hideous abomination.  You get in in any of the following ways -

- Arbitrarily appointed by a member of the Royal Family (rare)
- Arbitrarily appointed by the Prime Minister (common - it's their way of getting power there, after all)
- Inherited from your parents (seriously... although some of these have been removed)
- Be a bishop in one of 14 churches in the country (so much for seperation...)
- Be elected (rare)

Good God, I know it's called a "Constitutional Monarchy" but I didn't think it really was rule by a nobility.  I'm curious about how the Parliamentary constituencies are drawn.  Do they have to have roughly equal population?  Or are they just traditional county boundaries of some kind?  For the record, the Electoral College is essentially a nonentity today, that only serves to divvy up Presidential voting power roughly along population, but it used to be a lot different.  Why it even still exists I have no idea, aside from being a useful tool for gerrymandering.

Although with perhaps a hundred or so people, you may be able to colonize a section of Antarctica if you have some type of good production exporting. It would be a free life of a very specialized trade

Oh God, please don't do this to my thread.  I know it's fun and all, but there's only so much Sealandia I can take.  It attracts the moonbats don't you know.

[sneakey pete]

Do you think any country has it by choice?

hehe. I guess we were lucky to have formed up so late (1901). we took the good bits and left the fat behind, even though it was impossible for the UK to get rid of it themselves.

Basically, we have the house of representatives, and the senate. In each, there's a certian number of seats, each seat attached to a geographical area with approximatly the same population, i think. at least, the theory is that the constituancy of each seat is about the same. Local candidate will run etc. (sometimes not all parties will run a candidate, depending on how the area votes previously). As i said before, the leader of each party is decided by the parties members. This can sometimes lead to interesting situations where the leader (or just another important party member) of the party that gets the majority of seats doesn't actually win his own seat, which actually happened to our ex PM last election, though his party also lost.

In the house of representatives, which the leader of the parties all run in, the ruling party (or coaliton if needs be) will have its leader become the Prime minister, and will select people who have been elected to be ministers for different areas (eg minister for health, or minister for workplace relations, treasury etc.), and the opposition party will select "shadow" ministers, who basically specialise in critizing that area of the government. In essence, the house or representatives proposes the bills, the senate must pass them.

So yes, its vastly different from the US system anyway, so me propsing ideas that work well for us aren't going to be of any use i guess, since your president doesn't actually have to hold a local seat, and that, (i think?) your members of the house of representatives and senate are assigned arbitarily from each state?

also "amerka sux dude" 

[Leafsnail]

Good God, I know it's called a "Constitutional Monarchy" but I didn't think it really was rule by a nobility.

Well... the majority of the Lords are appointed.  Which basically means the Prime Minister gets to choose.  Is he going to pick pro-government or anti-government Lords?  Doesn't exactly take a political expert to figure it out.

I'm curious about how the Parliamentary constituencies are drawn.  Do they have to have roughly equal population?  Or are they just traditional county boundaries of some kind?

They do try to keep the boundaries accurate, although there used to be a serious problem with "Rotten Boroughs" (tiny constituencies with their own MP) and large towns like Liverpool and Manchester not getting one (due to being fairly new).  Now they just split up big towns and merge them together if the constituencies are too small.  The main problem with the system is that a small lead in the polls turns into a massive majority in parliament.

For the record, the Electoral College is essentially a nonentity today, that only serves to divvy up Presidential voting power roughly along population, but it used to be a lot different.  Why it even still exists I have no idea, aside from being a useful tool for gerrymandering.

I thought it was something like "Amount of seats based on population +2", theoretically giving those in small states a louder voice, but I'm not sure.

In some ways, the fact that Britain has been a "democracy" (that term definately requires inverted commas) for so long is one of the reasons the system is so messed up.  No government ever has the time or resolve to seriously attempt to sort out the mess.

[Aqizzar]

So yes, its vastly different from the US system anyway, so me propsing ideas that work well for us aren't going to be of any use i guess, since your president doesn't actually have to hold a local seat, and that, (i think?) your members of the house of representatives and senate are assigned arbitarily from each state?

Nope, they're elected too, with their own party primaries and all the other jazz.  The difference being they're elected by straight popular vote within their constituency, unlike the headscratching mess of the Presidential Electoral College.  They're also divided up by population and region.  Each state gets two Senators, elected by the whole state (in most states, if a Senator leaves office for some reason, the Governor gets to appoint a replacement).

The House of Representatives has 435 members in perpetuity (and a few non-voting members representing American territories and the capitol city itself, which yes does not get a vote in Congress).  The 435 are divided up between the states as evenly as the 10-year census allows.  Currently, they each represented about 650-700 thousand people (roughly the population of the capitol, ironically).  If you're wondering why it's a funky number like 435, originally they were supposed to stand for 30,000 people each, but that was amended to a static number, because today the Congress would be over 10000 people otherwise.  It just happened to stop at 435.

For the record, the Electoral College is essentially a nonentity today, that only serves to divvy up Presidential voting power roughly along population, but it used to be a lot different.  Why it even still exists I have no idea, aside from being a useful tool for gerrymandering.

I thought it was something like "Amount of seats based on population +2", theoretically giving those in small states a louder voice, but I'm not sure.

Yes, the Electoral College representation of each state matches their number of House and Senate seats, which does give small states a little more voting power by average.  That's why you see Presidential candidates spending all their time in Iowa and Nebraska and crap, instead of the big states.  Although that's also because the more populous states are pretty solidly sworn to one party, and Iowa holds the earliest primary which somehow indicates how the rest of the nomination process will go.

[sneakey pete]

Don't get it wrong though, the Australian system isn't all that good. for example in the last election, the winning party had 43% of the overall vote, but won 55% of the seats, where as the other party had 41% of the vote but only got 43% of the seats.

They're also divided up by population and region.  Each state gets two Senators, elected by the whole state (in most states, if a Senator leaves office for some reason, the Governor gets to appoint a replacement).

ah, it was the senators that i found a little odd... doesn't quite seem fair that tiny states like rhode island get two, while states like california still get.... two. Of course, you can't have half a senator, nor would having over 400 of them do you any good either, so i guess that's a bit of a complex problem.

Of course, you could just get rid of states rights...

[Zai]

ah, it was the senators that i found a little odd... doesn't quite seem fair that tiny states like rhode island get two, while states like california still get.... two.

That's what the House of Representatives is for.

[tehstefan]

Heh, as Zai said, yeah, the House of representatives is dominated by big states. It mainly was put into place because all the small states threw a fit over how the big states would dominate politics, back in oh, 1790's or so.

[Leafsnail]

Same in the EU.  The max number of seats in the EU parliament is 100, while the minimum is 6.  If this weren't the case, Germany would have 600 and Liechenstein would have 1 (if it were done totally fairly).

[Aqizzar]

You have to understand that the U.S. Constitution really is a document from another time.  When it was adopted in 1787, the whole country was only a few million people.  Since the first colonies were founded in the 1590s right through to the 1770s every state was essentially its own independent entity, and most of the expected to continue being such forever.  The United States was supposed to be exactly that, a common alliance of independent states, and the smaller ones especially wanted to make sure they were just as important.  It wasn't until the Civil War a century later that the question of what a federal government was actually supposed to be was truly settled, much to the continuing chagrin of culture voters today.

It also reflected European political culture more than people wanted to believe.  The Senate, with its arbitrary numbers and longer terms, really was supposed to be a kind of American House of Lords, elected yes but populated by elder statesmen removed from the petty concerns of electioneering.  It kind of worked - you do see the Senate usually being the more politically active of the two bodies, whereas Representatives have to spend a lot more time wheeling around their districts for their more frequent elections.

[Eagleon]

Very interesting thread. Glad to see it hasn't devolved into shitflinging yet

I don't know a lot about this stuff. I haven't thought about it a ton, beyond realizing what a mess it all is. That said, I wonder what really would be the consequences of completely eliminating financial contributions to a candidate for public office? Obviously this would be a drastic move, and there would always be side-donations here and there that would be impossible to trace, but if we're already limiting an individual's right to contribute materials to an election, it's not a far step from eliminating that right completely. Then personal finances would come more into play, and that might be a tricky problem, except that there are very few if any people that could afford to buy as many TV spots as modern politicians do. Personally if I had that much money, I'd rather keep it and not be president, than be president for four years and significantly less wealthy afterwards. I guess it also boils down to what constitutes a donation, but surely this would be a major blow to people that buy elections, and allow for a somewhat more even playing field.

You mentioned an election in the past where candidates largely focused on high-population states, but is this likely to happen in the modern age? It would become a question of gaining news coverage, I suppose, but recent grassroots movements have been pretty successful with using the internet to reach wider audiences. I'm not so sure a decent candidate couldn't gain that kind of attention through facebook and ground-pounding a region alone.

There are probably more problems with this than I can possibly imagine, I'm just wondering if it would be even slightly less silly than what we have now.

[Willfor]

Canada is also a Constitutional Monarchy. Though when one of our citizens made it to the British House of Lords, we, as a nation, removed him from our hearts. It could very well be because he was a criminal...

I'm not sure how much longer we're going to keep the Queen as our Head of State because right now the system is being abused. By the people I voted for! Shame.

[Akigagak]

Don't forget the Aussies, they're still part of our club.

Not that any British person really gives two dead rats whether or not they become independent from the crown. Hell, I think most of us think they already are, given the lack of recent history that is taught.

[Neonivek]

Many Canadians are thinking of ousting the royal family once the Queen dies (I don't blame them... frankly while I held some regard for the Queen her hiers don't interest me)

[Leafsnail]

Hmm... I'd say the commonwealth nations are one of the main reasons why Britain still has a monarch at all.