Stardate 20030528.1712

(On Screen): The Last Toryboy posts from the UK in response to an article I posted a couple of days ago, where I made a comment about a deep division in general philosophy of government between Europeans and Americans. It's a point I've written about before at much greater length.

The basic idea is that in Europe there's a long tradition of power and control being held centrally, due to the tradition of rule by the aristocracy. In the American philosophy, power vests in the populace which makes the decision to lend some of that power to the government for the greater good. Which means that we tend to think of our elected officials as leading us, whereas Europeans think of theirs as ruling them.

Toryboy objects. His points have to do with the fact that the Members of Parliament have a strong attachment to specific districts and must stand for election individually, which is true for the British system. But there are a lot of parliamentary systems in Europe, and as such things go the British system is at one extreme end of the scale.

In a lot of the Continental systems, voters don't get to select specific people to represent them in the parliament. They vote for parties and each party goes into the election with a slate of candidates. Based on the total number of votes a party gets, it will be allocated a certain number of seats in the chamber and then fills them with the first umpteen people on its slate of candidates.

Sometimes that's done country-wide; in other cases it's done on a per-state basis. But what it means is that there's a strong disconnect between the people who serve in the parliament and the voters. Individual MPs have their primary loyalty to the party leadership, not to their constituents, because if they don't toe the line they won't be included in the slate of candidates for the next election, or may be moved down in the list.

The American system for electing the House of Representatives is much more like the British system (and, in fact, was based on it), with each individual Representative having to stand for election in a specific district every two years. They're in a party, and the party they're part of does matter, but they as individuals have to face the voters. That makes the government much more accountable.

In the American system, I have a Representative. But in some European countries, a given voter may not really think of any particular member of Parliament as being "his" representative.