Читать книгу Political Science For Dummies - Marcus A. Stadelmann - Страница 88

Parliamentary democracies are very common in Europe and also found in Australia and New Zealand. Germany and Great Britain are the two major examples of parliamentary democracies. In a parliamentary democracy, the people don’t vote for their executive, be it a prime minster or chancellor, directly; instead, they vote for a member of a legislature. The legislature then selects the executive. It’s usually the majority political party that gets to select the executive. The following diagram shows how parliamentary democracy works in Great Britain:

Parliamentary systems tend to be dominated by the executive. The British prime minister has to have a majority in parliament and controls his political party with an iron fist (see Chapter 6). Instead of having separation of power and checks and balances between the legislature and the executive, there exists a fusion of power, where the two branches of governments are intermixed. All power is in the hands of the executive.

For this reason, it’s easy to pass legislation, and parliamentary systems tend to respond quickly to the public’s wishes for new policies.