What's in a name? Semi-parliamentarism and Australian Commonwealth executive-legislative relations

Taflaga, Marija

doi:10.1080/10361146.2018.1451484

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…However, owing to the different voting system of the upper house, the government rarely holds a majority in the Senate (no government has since 2007). Thus, it is in the upper house where the real negotiations about bills take place (Taflaga, 2018).…”

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confidence: 99%

Moral framings in the Australian parliamentary debate on drug testing of welfare recipients

2021

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Moral framings in the Australian parliamentary debate on drug testing of welfare recipients

2021

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“…Based on this criterion, the first semi-parliamentary systems emerged in the two nation-states in our sample. When the Australian Commonwealth was established in 1901, it was the first democracy to combine a second chamber that was directly elected under universal suffrage with the constitutional convention that cabinets require only the confidence of the first chamber (Smith 2018a;Taflaga 2018). In Japan, semi-parliamentarism was established in 1947 and reflected a compromise between the constitutional ideas of the Japanese government and the Allied powers, especially the United States (Rosenzweig 2010: 294).…”

Section: The Historical Evolution Of Semi-parliamentarismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the Australian constitutional crisis of 1974-1975, the Senate's right to deny supply led the Governor General and the Chief Justice of the High Court to argue that the survival of the cabinet depended on both chambers (Aroney et al 2015: 412-417;Bach 2003: 111-119;Barry and Miragliotta 2015;Taflaga 2018). Today, though, many authors doubt that the budget veto makes much of a difference, in part because of how informal constitutional norms changed after the 1974-1975 crisis (Smith 2018a: 258-259;Stone 2008: 181).…”

Section: No-confidence Authoritymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This fact highlights how important it is to include the Australian states in the empirical analyses of this book, and it helps us to better understand why the comparative literature typically treats the Australian Commonwealth and Japan as parliamentary systems. Even in these cases, though, the combination of direct second-chamber elections with the lack of second-chamber confidence authority over the cabinet is at odds with the logic of a parliamentary system-a fact that has been recognized by country experts (e.g., Bach 2003: 330;Taflaga 2018;Takayasu 2015: 160;Takeshi 2005: 39).…”

Section: Absolute Veto Power On Ordinary Legislationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism

Ganghof¹

2021

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In a democracy, a constitutional separation of powers between the executive and the assembly may be desirable, but the constitutional concentration of executive power in a single human being is not. The book defends this thesis and explores ‘semi-parliamentary government’ as an alternative to presidential government. Semi-parliamentarism avoids power concentration in one person by shifting the separation of powers into the democratic assembly. The executive becomes fused with only one part of the assembly, even though the other part has at least equal democratic legitimacy and robust veto power on ordinary legislation. The book identifies the Australian Commonwealth and Japan, as well as the Australian states of New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia, as semi-parliamentary systems. Using data from 23 countries and 6 Australian states, it maps how parliamentary and semi-parliamentary systems balance competing visions of democracy; it analyzes patterns of electoral and party systems, cabinet formation, legislative coalition-building, and constitutional reforms; it systematically compares the semi-parliamentary and presidential separation of powers; and it develops new and innovative semi-parliamentary designs, some of which do not require two separate chambers.

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“…In Australia, this was the position of the Governor-General and the Chief Justice of the High Court during the crisis of 1974-75 (Bach 2003, 111-119;Barry and Miragliotta 2015). They based their position on the Senate's right to deny supply (see also Aroney et al 2015, 412-417;Taflaga 2018).…”

Section: Real-word Deviations From the Ideal Typementioning

confidence: 99%

Australian bicameralism as semi-parliamentarism: patterns of majority formation in 29 democracies

Ganghof

Eppner

Pörschke

2018

Australian Journal of Political Science

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The article analyses the type of bicameralism we find in Australia as a distinct executive-legislative system -a hybrid between parliamentary and presidential government -which we call 'semiparliamentary government'. We argue that this hybrid presents an important and underappreciated alternative to pure parliamentary government as well as presidential forms of the power-separation, and that it can achieve a certain balance between competing models or visions of democracy. We specify theoretically how the semi-parliamentary separation of powers contributes to the balancing of democratic visions and propose a conceptual framework for comparing democratic visions. We use this framework to locate the Australian Commonwealth, all Australian states and 22 advanced democratic nation-states on a twodimensional empirical map of democratic patterns for the period from

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What's in a name? Semi-parliamentarism and Australian Commonwealth executive-legislative relations

Cited by 9 publications

References 5 publications

Moral framings in the Australian parliamentary debate on drug testing of welfare recipients

Moral framings in the Australian parliamentary debate on drug testing of welfare recipients

Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism

Australian bicameralism as semi-parliamentarism: patterns of majority formation in 29 democracies

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