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Class 34: Great Britain

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Title: Class 34: Great Britain


1
Class 3-4 Great Britain
  • The Westminster Model
  • Single-member electoral system
  • Economic and political modernization
  • Hegemony
  • Political cleavages
  • Head of state/Head of government
  • Common law

2
Major institutions in Great Britain
  • House of Commons main legislative powers.
  • House of Lords ability to delay legislation and
    suggest revisions.
  • Prime Minister and Cabinet primary executive
    (head of government).
  • Monarchy ceremonial and diplomatic functions
    (head of state).

3
Head of Government vs. Head of State
  • Head of Government Holder of main executive
    powers.
  • Head of State Holder of primary ceremonial
    international pwer.

4
Political Parties
  • Major parties
  • Labour
  • Conservative
  • Minor third party
  • Liberal Democrats (Lib Dems)
  • Regional parties
  • Scottish National Party (SNP)
  • Plaid Cymru (Wales)
  • N. Ireland parties

5
The Westminster Model
  • Book definition -- A form of democracy based on
    the supreme authority of Parliament and the
    accountability of its elected representatives
    named after the site of the Parliament building
    in Westminster, a borough of London.
  • Parliamentary democracy -- System of government
    in which the chief executive is answerable to the
    legislature and may be dismissed by it.

6
The Westminster Model
  • Parliamentary sovereignty -- A constitutional
    principle of government (principally in Britain)
    by which the legislature reserves the power to
    make or overturn any law without recourse by the
    executive, the judiciary, or the monarchy. Only
    Parliament can nullify or overturn legislation
    approved by Parliament and Parliament can force
    the cabinet or the government to resign by voting
    a motion of no confidence.

7
Checks and Balances vs. Majority Rule
8
The Westminster Model (Theoretical Concept)
  • Maximization of majority rule (Lijphart).
  • Attributes
  • Parliamentary sovereignty.
  • Executive elected from parliament and backed by a
    majority in the legislature.
  • Limited constitutional constraints, or no formal
    constitution.
  • Unitary state
  • Two-party system.
  • Single-member plurality electoral system.

9
Fusion of Powers
  • Book definition -- A constitutional principle
    that merges the authority of branches of
    government, in contrast to the principle of
    separation of powers. In Britain, for example,
    Parliament is the supreme legislative, executive
    and judicial authority. The fusion of
    legislative and executive is also expressed in
    the function and personnel of the cabinet.

10
Government Formation
  • General election
  • Crown invites the leader of party with majority
    in House of Commons to form a government and
    serve as Prime Minister.
  • PM appoints Cabinet, which consists in Britain of
    approximately 24 members.
  • Cabinet presents policies to Parliament, along
    with an assumption of collective responsibility.

11
Variations on Government Formation
  • Minority governments.
  • Coalition governments.
  • National unity governments.
  • Different methods of deciding who forms
    government
  • Passive role of Head of State.
  • Active role of Head of State.
  • Automatic selection according to Constitutional
    rules.

12
Constitutional Monarchy
  • Queen-in-Parliament.
  • Hereditary succession.
  • Head of State.
  • Primarily ceremonial.
  • Foreign policy functions.
  • Moral authority and leadership.
  • Some countries have a similar system, but with an
    elected president, rather than a hereditary king
    or queen (ex. Israel, Czech Republic, Germany).

13
Single-member plurality (SMP) electoral system.
  • Book definition -- an electoral system in which
    candidates run for a single seat from a specific
    geographic district. The winner is the person
    who receives the most votes, whether or not that
    is a majority. SMP systems, unlike proportional
    representations, increase the likelihood that two
    national coalition parties will form.

14
Single-Member Majority (SMM) Electoral System
  • An electoral system in which candidates run for a
    single seat from a specific geographic district.
    The winner is the person who receives a majority
    of votes. If there is no candidate receiving a
    majority in the first round of election, the top
    two vote recipients enter a second round of
    voting. SMM systems encourage multiple parties
    in the first round, with coalition-building for
    the runoff vote.

15
Duverger's Law
  • Where an SMP system is in place, there will tend
    to be two national parties.
  • Why?
  • Strategic voting.
  • Ideologies tend towards centrality.
  • Incentives for parties to form coalitions prior
    to elections.
  • Other parties have difficult entering.

16
Exceptions to Duverger's Law
  • Geographically centered parties form in federal
    systems (Canada).
  • A centrally located party ideologically, which
    becomes essential for coalitions (India).

17
Effects of SMP
  • Exaggerates the size of the largest party, and
    reduces influence of regionally dispersed
    parties.
  • Ex. In 2005, with 35.2 percent of the popular
    vote, Labour won 355 seats. With 22.1 percent of
    the vote, the Liberal Democrats won 62 seats.
  • Tends toward single-party governments.
  • Tends toward ideological homogeneity.

18
Classic Model of Modernization
  • Britain usually given a privileged position in
    comparative politics.
  • Often considered the successful model of peaceful
    democratization and economic modernizaiton.

19
2 Phases of Industrial Revolution
  • Phase 1 concentration of agriculture, rise of
    merchants bourgeoisie, and guarantee of
    property rights. Followed by mass migration to
    the cities.
  • Phase 2 development of industry, utilization of
    fossil fuels, increased communication, and
    increasing importance of labor.

20
Phase 1 The Enclosure Movement (14th -16th c.)
  • Demand for English wool, along with declining
    population, encourages the raising of sheep to
    replace large-scale grain farming.
  • This sharply reduces the demand for peasant
    labor, and increases the price of food.
  • It also concentrates money into the landholders,
    providing investment funds.
  • Landholders press for stable, well-defined,
    property rights.
  • Evicted peasants move to the cities, creating a
    surplus of cheap labor.

21
Phase 2 Industrial Expansion
  • Development of new technologies, along with new
    fuel (coal) allowed for large expansion of
    output.
  • Also allowed for organization and expression of
    demands from organized labor.
  • Liberal party begins pressure for full suffrage.
  • Largely credited with the emergence of the 19th
    c. of the liberal philosophy, centered around
    limited government and personal freedoms.

22
Strategies of Economic Development
  • Liberal classically liberal in the
    nineteenth-century European sense, favoring
    free-market solutions to economic problems and
    extensive personal freedoms for individuals.
  • Dominant strategy of economic development from
    early 19th c. to 1940.
  • Adam Smith, 1723-1790.
  • Also called laissez-faire, French for to let
    do

23
Strategies for Economic Development
  • Role of government in liberal paradigm
  • Enforce contracts
  • Protect property rights
  • Provide for national defense

24
Strategies of Economic Development
  • Keynesianism named after the British economist
    John Maynard Keynes, an approach to economic
    policy in which state economic policies are used
    to regulate the economy in an attempt to achieve
    stable economic growth.

25
Strategies of Economic Development.
  • Counter-cyclical spending During recession,
    state budget deficits are used to expand demand
    in an effort to boost both consumption and
    investment, and to create employment. During
    periods of high growth, when inflation threatens,
    cuts in government spending and a tightening of
    credit are used to reduce demand.
  • Main strategy from 1945-1980.
  • Goal of full-employment.

26
Strategies of Economic Development
  • Monetarism An approach to economic policy that
    assumes a natural rate of unemployment determined
    by the labor market, emphasizes setting targets
    for the rate of growth of the monetary supply,
    gives highest priority to controlling inflation,
    and rejects the instrument of government spending
    to run budgetary deficits for stimulating the
    economy.
  • Also called neo-liberalism.
  • Basis of Thatcherite economic policy.

27
New Left/ Third Way
  • A centrist philosophy that supports a mix of
    market and interventionist policies. It rejects
    both top-down redistribution and liberal
    approaches to economic governance, chiefly
    stressing technology, education, and
    competitivene mechanisms for economic growth.
  • Developed by Wilhelm Ropke (social capitalism)
    and Anthony Giddens.
  • Basis for Labour policy under Tony Blair.

28
Policies of the Third Way
  • Fiscal conservatism
  • Replacement of welfare with workfare
  • Pollution markets
  • Use of market solutions to traditional problems.

29
Hegemony
  • Hegemonic power a state that can control the
    pattern of alliances and terms of the
    international order, and often shapes domestic
    political developments in countries throughout
    the world.
  • Originated in ancient Greece, and occurred when
    Sparta became the hegemon in the Poloponnesian
    League.
  • British Empire in the 19th c. often considered
    the first global hagemon.

30
Attributes of Hegemony
  • 2 methods of spreading hegemony
  • Hard power military strength, the ability to
    defeat opponents at war.
  • Soft power widespread acceptance of economic
    and social norms.
  • These two often interrelate.
  • Relationship to free trade periods of free
    trade in the 19th c., and then after World War
    II, are often linked to the interests of a
    hegemonic economic power.

31
Attributes of Hegemony
  • Spread of Ideas
  • Antonio Gramsci -- the process whereby ideas,
    structures, and actions come to be seen by the
    majority of people as wholly natural,
    preordained, and working for their own good, when
    in fact they are constructed and transmitted by
    powerful minority interests to protect the status
    quo that serves those interests.
  • Francis Fukuyama (1989) -- End of History --
    What we may be witnessing is...the end of
    history as such that is the end point of
    mankind's ideological evolution and
    universalization of Western liberal democracy as
    the final form of human government.

32
Attributes of Hegemony
  • Economic influence --
  • Colonialism the extension of a state's
    sovereignty over territory beyond its borders by
    the establishment of either settler colonies or
    administrative dependencies in which indigenous
    populations are directly ruled or displaced.
  • Economic dependence at its strongest, where a
    country is so dependent on another's economy as a
    market or source of goods, that it cannot
    function without it, and the first country is
    able to influence positive change. At a weaker
    level, some policies may be unable to be
    implemented without the hegemon's participation.

33
Is the US a Hegemon Today?
34
Political Cleavages
  • A concept which defines voters into groups, based
    upon their position on certain, historically
    salient, issues.
  • (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967).

35
Major cleavages in Western Europe
  • Center-Periphery The division of elites in the
    central and more outlying areas of a
    nation-state. Mainly used in terms of
    sub-national movements. (ex. Scotland and N.
    Ireland)
  • State-Church A division between religious and
    secular voters. Often discussed in terms of
    church privileges and lands, and particular
    social issues. (ex. Netherlands until 1970s).

36
Major cleavages in Western Europe
  • Owner-Worker A division between the rich and
    poor, or between capital and labor. (ex. Labour
    vs. Conservative)
  • Urban-Rural Agrarian parties versus
    representatives of more urban interests. Usually
    only occurs in areas where there is a
    particularly well-educated rural class. (ex.
    Agrarian parties in Scandinavia).

37
Judiciary in Great Britain
  • In Britain, courts have no power to judge the
    constitutionality of legislative acts (judicial
    review). They can only determine whether policy
    directives or administrative acts violate common
    law or an act of parliament.
  • Commissions and public inquiries jurists often
    participate in investigations of government
    policies.
  • Law Chancellor and law lords Department in the
    House of Lords that holds the ultimate authority
    of appeal in British law.

38
International Judiciary
  • European Court of Justice (ECJ)
  • European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)
  • European Court of Justice on Human Rights (ECJHR)

39
Common Law
  • Judges have the authority and duty to decide what
    the law is when there is no other authoritative
    statement of the law. Begins with cases and
    moves to abstract rules.
  • Stare Decisis -- prior court decisions must be
    considered precidents for future rulings. Stare
    decisis et non quieta movere (Stand by
    decisions and do not move that which is quiet)
  • Edmund Burke it is only with great trepidation
    that someone should tear down a norm that has
    served the society well in the past.
  • Primarily used in Great Britain and its former
    colonies (including the US).

40
Civil (Code) Law
  • Descendant mainly from Roman law, the Napoleonic
    Code, and the German Civil Code.
  • Case law is given less weight, and greater
    emphasis is given to interpretation of actual
    legal codes.
  • Starts with abstract rules (or laws) that are
    applied to the specific case.
  • Main form of law in the world (Continental
    Europe, Japan, China, Latin America, and
    Louisiana).

41
Bureaucracy
  • Quangos acronym for quasi-nongovernmental
    organization, the term is used in Britain for
    nonelected bodies that are outside traditional
    governmental departments or local authorities.
    They have considerable influence over public
    policy in areas such as education, health care,
    and housing.

42
Bureaucracy and Independent
  • Bureaucratic drift the ability for
    bureaucracies to move policies, through its
    implementation, closer to its goals or standard
    operating procedures.
  • Bureaucratic information advantage.
  • Bureaucratic time advantage.
  • Bureaucratic allies advantage.
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