The British Parliament
Having established its superiority over the monarch, Parliament found its position threatened in the 19th century from another quarter. The growth of the idea of democracy led to the development of disciplined parties in Parliament, particularly in the House of Commons, which seemed to threaten the idealized notion of parliaments as assemblies of free and independent members. Growth of parties allied to the expansion of government activity and the increased complexity of business has meant that the 20th century has seen power in the United Kingdom and in many other political systems pass to the executive department. As a result, while in the United Kingdom the century has seen the dominance of the Commons over the House of Lords, the role of Parliament as a whole has been one of sanctioning the formation of governments, providing the personnel of governments, and then subjecting them to criticism and checking. Decisions about ending the life of governments have largely passed to the electorate via general elections, although occasionally, as happened in 1979, governments effectively can have their life ended by defeat in the Commons. Much energy has been devoted in systems like the British to devising ways in which parliament can cope with the problems posed by the power of the executive. One dimension of that struggle is the debate about specialization. How far do Members of Parliament need to specialize in order to cope with the demands of business? In many parliaments, committee systems are organized along specialized lines: in the United Kingdom the establishment of such committees has been slow and fragmentary. Considerable emphasis is still placed on plenary activities such as Question Time as a means of criticizing the executive and also as a way of establishing political reputations.
Figure 1: Tony Blair
Tony Blair became leader of the British Labour Party in 1994 after the death of John Smith. He transformed the party’s ideological stance, presiding over what many older left-wing activists lamented as the death of socialism. However, in the May 1997 general election he led his party to its greatest-ever election victory, with Blair himself becoming the youngest prime minister of the United Kingdom for over 150 years. Ironically, having been criticized by some as the betrayer of Labour’s socialist traditions, Blair became overnight the Western world’s most popular and powerful left-wing politician.
Figure 2: Main Political Parties in UK Government Since 1900
Number of Chambers
Parliaments commonly consist of two chambers, but there are numerous examples of countries that manage with a single chamber and some which seem to require more than two. A single chamber is frequently associated with relatively small countries such as Denmark, Israel, and New Zealand, though South Korea also operates a one-chamber assembly. New Zealand, for example, has managed with a single-chamber 92-seat House of Representatives since it abolished its upper house in 1950. An example of a parliament with more than two chambers is that of South Africa between 1984 and 1994. This was a tricameral parliament with separate chambers for whites, Coloureds, and Indians. Prior to 1984, for a brief period from 1980 South Africa had a unicameral parliament, since 1994 it has had a bicameral system with two houses. The 400-member National Assembly represents the individual citizens while the 90-seat Senate consists of ten members elected indirectly from each of the country's nine provinces.
Composition
The norm, at least among parliaments in the developed world, is two chambers. Typically among such parliaments at least one house will be elected by popular vote (most lower chambers are of this type). Frequently the second or upper chamber is also popularly elected, but on a different basis from the lower house. In Japan, for example, both houses of the Diet, the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors, are directly elected, but on a different basis. In the United States the Senate is elected from states as units rather than the single-member constituencies of the House of Representatives. The Australian system has some similarities to this: the lower house, the House of Representatives, consists of 148 members elected from single-member constituencies while in the upper house or Senate each state has 12 members elected from the state at large. In some systems the second chamber may not be elected at all; for example, the House of Lords in the United Kingdom consists of those who have inherited peerages; those who have been nominated to serve by being given life, or very rarely now, hereditary peerages; and law lords (senior lawyers) and senior bishops of the Church of England. In the case of the Canadian Senate, membership is nominated. In some cases, as with the upper house in Germany, the Bundesrat, there is a system of indirect election, in this case of representatives of the individual units of the country, the Lander.
The European Parliament
Evidence of the need for parliaments is provided by the fact that although the European Union is not yet a state, it has a parliament. Since 1979 this body has been directly elected by the citizens of the Union. Elections are held every four years and membership in the Parliament is allocated among the member countries of the Union in a way that pays some regard to their populations. The Parliament currently has 624 seats. The smallest country, Luxembourg, has six seats and the largest, Germany, 99; France, Italy, and Great Britain each have 87 seats.
Political Elections
The formal process of selecting a person for public office or accepting or rejecting a political proposition by voting. The widespread use of elections in the modern world has its origins in the gradual emergence of representative government in Europe and North America since the 17th century.
Elections provide a means of making political choices by voting. This conception of elections implies that the voters are presented with alternatives, that they can choose among a number of proposals designed to settle an issue of public concern. The presence of alternatives is a necessary condition, for, although electoral forms may be employed to demonstrate popular support for incumbent leaders and their policies, the absence of alternatives disqualifies such devices as genuine elections.
The widespread use of elections in the modern world is due in large part to the gradual emergence of representative government from the 17th century on. For proper appraisal, however, it is important to distinguish between the form and substance of elections. Electoral forms may be present but the substance may be missing. The substance is, of course, that the voter has a free and genuine choice between at least two alternatives. In a purely formal sense, the great majority of the more than 150 contemporary nations have what are called “elections,” but probably only about a third of these have more or less competitive elections; perhaps a fifth have one-party elections; and in some others the electoral situation may be highly ambiguous.
The discovery of the individual as the unit to be counted was, from the 17th century on, the critical factor in the emergence of modern electoral processes. The counting of individuals, in turn, was a by-product of the change from the holistic conception of representation in the Middle Ages to an individualistic conception. The British Parliament, for instance, was seen no longer as representing estates, corporations, and vested interests but rather as standing for actual human beings. The movement abolishing “rotten boroughs”—boroughs of small population controlled by a single person or family—that culminated in the Reform Act of 1832 was a direct consequence of the individualistic conception of representation. Once governments were not only believed to derive their powers from the consent of the governed but were expected to seek consent, the only remaining problem was to decide who was to be included among the governed whose consent was to be sought. The democratic answer was, of course, universal adult suffrage.
Although it is common to equate representative government, elections, and democracy and although competitive elections under universal suffrage are in many respects a defining characteristic of political democracy, universal suffrage is not a necessary condition of competitive electoral politics. An electorate may be limited by formal legal requirements—as was the case before universal adult suffrage—or it may be limited by citizens' failure to take advantage of the vote, as is often the case in American municipal and other elections. Although such legal or self-imposed exclusion affects the democratic quality of elections and may ultimately affect the legitimacy of government, it does not impede decision making by election, provided the voter is presented with alternatives among which to choose.
Access to the political arena during the 18th century depended largely on membership in some aristocracy, and participation in elections was regulated mainly by local customs and arrangements. With the American and French revolutions, every citizen was declared formally equal to every other citizen, but the vote remained an instrument of political power possessed by very few.
Even with the arrival of universal suffrage, the ideal of “one man, one vote” was not achieved. Systems of plural voting were maintained in some countries, giving certain social groups an electoral advantage. In Great Britain, for example, university graduates and owners of businesses in constituencies other than those in which they lived continued to have an extra vote until 1948. Before World War I both Austria and Prussia had three classes of weighted votes that effectively kept electoral power in the hands of the upper social strata.
Whereas in the Western nations of the 19th and 20th centuries the increasing use of competitive mass elections in selecting governments had the purpose and the effect of institutionalizing the diversity of modern societies, in the Eastern, one-party, Communist regimes mass elections came to have quite different purposes and consequences. They differed from competitive elections in that each voter usually had only the choice of voting for or against the official candidate. Indeed, they were in the nature of the 19th-century Napoleonic plebiscites, in that they were intended to demonstrate the unity rather than the diversity of the people.
Dissent could be registered by crossing out the name of the candidate on the ballot, as several million Soviet citizens did in each election before 1989. As voting was not private, however, this invited reprisals. It may well be that some portion of dissenting votes were cast not so much because of dislike of Communism but because of grievances involving the conduct of minor officials. This may have served to weed out some of the worst officials at the very lowest levels. Even not voting was a form of protest, especially because local Communist Party activists were under extreme pressure to get nearly a 100 percent turnout. Before the revolutions of 1989, not all elections in eastern Europe followed the Soviet model exactly. In Poland, for instance, more names appeared on the ballot than there were offices to fill, and some degree of electoral choice was possible.
Many authoritarian regimes throughout the world have attempted to gain some level of legitimacy through the holding of elections. This may be done when it is clear that, because of repression, no substantive opposition is remotely feasible. Often, however, the process is more subtle in order to maximize the regime's gains. Elections may be scheduled when economic factors favour the regime and, more importantly, when election laws have been written to the severe disadvantage of competing parties. The opposition may be given little time to prepare, while the government already has various networks of supporters in place. Challengers also may be forced to campaign in an atmosphere of intimidation that precludes the effective organization of many potential supporters. A regime may cite unrelated reasons for postponing an election if it perceives a significant chance of losing. Also, it is not uncommon for government intervention to occur once balloting has begun, either in the form of voter intimidation (not infrequently actually attacking voters) or manipulating the count of votes freely cast.
A Political Party
A group of persons organized to acquire and exercise political power. Political parties originated in their modern form in Europe and the United States in the 19th century, along with the electoral and parliamentary systems, whose development reflects the evolution of parties. The term party has since come to be applied to all organized groups seeking political power, whether by democratic elections or by revolution.
In earlier, pre-Revolutionary, aristocratic and monarchical regimes, the political process unfolded within restricted circles in which cliques and factions, grouped around particular noblemen or influential personalities, were opposed to one another. The establishment of parliamentary regimes and the appearance of parties at first scarcely changed this situation. To cliques formed around princes, dukes, counts, or marquises there were added cliques formed around bankers, merchants, industrialists, and businessmen. Regimes supported by nobles were succeeded by regimes supported by other elites. These narrowly based parties were later transformed to a greater or lesser extent, for in the 19th century in Europe and America there emerged parties depending on mass support.
The 20th century saw the spread of political parties throughout the entire world. In Africa large parties have sometimes been formed in which a modern organization has a more traditional ethnic or tribal basis; in such cases the party leadership is frequently made up of tribal chiefs. In certain areas of Asia, membership in modern political parties is often determined largely by religious factors or by affiliation with ritual brotherhoods. Many political parties in the developing countries are partly political, partly military. Certain Socialist and Communist parties in Europe earlier experienced the same tendencies.
These last-mentioned European parties have demonstrated an equal aptitude for functioning within multiparty democracies and as the sole political party in a dictatorship. Developing originally within the framework of liberal democracy in the 19th century, political parties have been used in the 20th century by dictatorships for entirely undemocratic purposes.
Leader of the Conservative Party – Ian Duncan Smith
Leader of the Labour Party – Tony Blair
Leader of the Liberal Democrats Party – Charles Kennedy