Why does the USA use a winner-takes-all style of democracy while other nations use more of a parliamentary system?

It was my understanding (and this could be totally off the mark) that the UK has a house of commons, a house of lords, and the PM and that these positions somewhat relate to our congress, senate, and president. While it is true that our political system doesn’t encourage multiple parties beyond the two main ones—which I do believe is problematic, I wish our system was more like the run off systems you find elsewhere that encourage third (or fourth and fifth!) parties, I thought there were lots of similarities between the British system and our own.

Can you please elaborate on the differences?

The answer has to do with the particular history of the United States, and I’m a bit weak on that. I do know that the form of the government arose out of a lot of horse trading amongst the thirteen original states. States did not want to lose power, and have other states dominate the government due to a larger population. So they insisted that there be some measure of equality, and that turned out to be the Senate, which has an equal number of representatives from every state.

For Congress, the population of the US is divided by 435, and then the state redistricting commissions carve up the territory so that each congressional district has an almost equal number of people in it (I think they are allowed to be off by plus or minus 20,000 folks). So each Congressional Representative represents an equal number of people, no matter which state they come from. States like California have a lot of reps, while Montana and Vermont have only 1. Yet Montana, Vermont, and California each have two Senators.

The result is supposed to balance the weight of population with regional interests.

We decided to elect a President and give them a lot of power, as a unifying figure. More than that, I’m not sure, but there is some technical stuff about where a Prime Minister comes from, and why that wouldn’t be advisable here, while a President was believed to work better.

I’m sure others can fill in more of the story.

I don’t understand what you mean by “winner take all”. The only position that has one party in full control or not is the President. And that’s simply because you can’t split one person into two.

The Congress is made up of whomever is elected by the states’ elections. It’s not even “winner take all” at that level, because one state could elect different parties’ representatives and senators.

Seeing as the President has little real power in comparison to the whole of the Congress, I don’t get why you think it’s “winner take all”...

I think you may be referring to what’s called “proportional representation”, where the representation for each district in the legislative body is reflective of the percentage of the votes that each party received. In other words, if in a given district party A got 2/3 of the vote, party B got 1/6 of the vote, and party C got 1/6, then instead of party A getting all of the seats (as we do in the US), all of the parties would go to the legislature in numbers proportional to the vote.

The advantage of this system is that it ensures a voice for the less popular parties. Another consequence is that it’s less likely that any one party will have a decisive majority, which is why we’re always hearing about the formation of governing coalitions in other countries.

This system is a relatively new development. It was first tried in Belgium in 1900, but now the majority of countries use it.

It actually has been tried a few times in local jurisdictions in the US as a way of breaking up domination by a single party.

@mritty, I assumed he was talking about each election. In each district, whoever gets the most votes, wins. In other countries, this is not the case. There is proportional representation, and each party gets the number of representatives in proportion to the number of votes they got.

I totally disagree with you about the power of the President. The President has enormous power to make decisions in areas that Congress can do little about. The President can do things now, while Congress can only do things by legislating them. Even that doesn’t work well, because the President gets to interpret the law with respect to administering it.

Perhaps most importantly, the President can do a huge amount with executive directives. Even as we speak, Bush is doing his best to use that power to put his ideology in place in the bureacracy. It will take Obama years to undo the damage. A lot of these directives are obscure and hard to find.

And, of course, the President can take us to war. He doesn’t need the permission of Congress, although he would like to have it. Congressional permission is just a courtesy.

Additionally, the President gets to propose a budget, and Congress has to work off that and amend it. That’s very significant. The President also gets to propose a lot of laws, and while Congress must enact them, they usually have to follow the President’s agenda, if they want to get anything done. The President can easily veto anything they pass, and it is very hard to override the veto. So, they have to deal with President to get anything done, and they don’t want to be seen as do-nothings, so they deal with the President, even if it’s on things they really don’t want to have a hand in.

Since we have a Senate, a Congress, appointed governors and mayors I don’t believe it is a “winner takes all system”. It may not be the ideal democracy but it is far from a dictatorship where one view is suppressed by another.

The difference that you’re talking about, daloon & Harp, is that the US doesn’t vote for “a party”. We vote for different individuals. The scenario Harp was using to demonstrate has no meaning in the United States. There is no situation in which “party A got 2/3 of the votes” and parties B and C got one sixth each. Parties A B and C are not on the ballot. Individual people are on the ballot. There is further no concept of “all the seats” or “2/3 of the seats” being awarded to a party. Each individual is running for one specific seat. Each voter votes for two senators and one representative. There are two senate seats and one house of representatives seats to fill.

We can agree to disagree about the comparative powers of the President vs the Congress, daloon. The President’s power comes from his ability to influence, make deals, and appoint the people he wants to the positions he wants. He can appoint a Supreme Court Justice that he thinks will best carry out his personal agenda, but once that Justice is appointed, the President has no power to decide what he can and can’t do.

Well, the proportional representation should be introduced in the Congress, which works for the interests of the people and it would be more “fair”.

While in Senate, every two years there are 33 seats each 2 years and each states gets to elect one senator. Now proportional representation wouldn’t make any sense, since you can’t proportionally split 1 seat (imagine two Senators on one seat).

@MrItty, many of the legislatures that now use proportional representation used to assign seats the way we currently do. We could modify our system as necessary, if we were so inclined. The House could be proportional and the Senate could remain as is, for example.

Winner takes all is where the winner of an election in a state wins that position (or the electoral votes from that state). If McCain takes 48% of the vote, for example, and Obama took 52%, Obama wins all of that state’s electoral votes. The two parties wouldn’t split the representation 48/52, it’s 100/0.

This is only true of 48 of the 50 states. Maine and Nebraska are a little different.

“Winner takes all” makes each state a bigger plum for the candidate to win, supposedly ensuring that all areas – big states as well as small rural ones – get to be a stop on the campaign trail. Without it, candidates may theoretically decide to spend their time in more populous areas to garner the most votes, like New York or LA, and totally ignore Boseman, Montana, for example. However, it doesn’t always work that way in reality. It also has several problems, including the possibility that the winner of the popular vote may lose the Presidential election.

Why is it winner-take-all? The writers of the Constitution didn’t favor having political parties. There is no provision for political parties in the Constitution – they saw the vote as being between individuals, not parties like in the Parliamentary system. As such, you can’t “proportionately” vote in individuals – either someone wins or not.

In the US there is no constitutional limitation on the number of political parties, in fact they are not even mentioned. At various times in our history, there have been more than two major parties, the last that was a major force was the Progressive Party founded by Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. The function of thrd parties in American politics in the last century has been that of ‘spoilers’ e.g. Taft lost the 1912 Presidential election when ex-President Roosevelt drew enough votes from the Republicans to give the election to Wilson. In 2000, the Green Party pulled enough votes away from the Democratic Party to allow Bush to win (even though Gore had more popular votes). Also Wallace in 1968 and Thurmond in 1948 influenced the outcome of Presidential elections.

The reason behind our rather strange system is practical; the United States would not have been formed without it. The US was formed out of, originally, 13 separate British colonies. With the assistance of France, they successfully broke away from the British Empire. When it came to forming a national government the states had to compromise. The smaller states would not agree to joining a nation that operated solely by direct representation. The larger population states would completely dominate the political system. A compromise was reached whereby two Houses of Congress were created. The Senate represents all states equally (2 votes each) and the House of Representatives represents based roughly on population, all states having a minimum of one vote.

We also have an indirect system of electing a President; state by state, winner take all (with two exceptions, Maine and Nebraska, which do it by Congressional districts). Each state having votes in an Electoral College equal to the size of its congressional delegation, meaning that even the least populous states have three votes (the District of Columbia also has three electoral votes). The reason for this is that many of the founders distrusted direct election, fearing that a popular but unqualified candidate might be chosen and wanted a ‘buffer’ to prevent this.

The reason that this system has remained in place is because of the process for amending the Constitution. Any amendment must be ratified by a super-majority of the states (I believe that it’s 38 out of 50, I haven’t verified this). There are more than 12 small population states, so any attempt to change to a direct or proportional system are doomed from the start. Small states will not give up the disporportionate power they hold.

An advantage of our system is that rural interests cannot be ignored, as they so frequently are in parliamentary systems. There are also numerous disadvantages. A resident of a low population state such as Alaska or Vermont has greater representation per capita than a resident of a large state such as California or Texas. In a practical sense, this balances out the economic power of the larger states by the voting power of smaller rural states.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land – I agree with everything you’ve said. Of course there have been many major parties in the past. (People think that the Democratic and Republican parties are two arms of government, not realizing that they are really two private clubs that get to choose what goes on in our government because people keep voting for them.)

However, the Constitutionally mandated “winner takes all” form of electing representatives is what practically insures that at any given time, there will be two major parties. Essentially, no one wants a third party to “drain” votes from the “lesser of two evils,” the way that people say Nader allowed GWBush to win, same with Ross Perot “helping” Bill Clinton by taking votes from Bush-the-Elder. In order to win the election, people have to rally behind the major party candidate that most represents their views, so really the two Majors are figureheads for loose coalitions of groups that can find enough commonality to keep the other guy from being elected.

The original Federal structure had the House for potentially parliamentary-style government (representing the people of various districts), and the Senate, representing the States (and filled by gubernatorial appointment), and both the People and the States had to agree to get things done. At some point, the Senate became electoral and therefore redundant.

It’s only winner-takes-all because only two parties are powerful enough to get someone into government. It’s sort of the political equivalent of an oligopoly, with the Democrats and Republicans being the big box stores and the third parties are the mom-and-pop shops.