The constitution and the executive

 

States may be classified as monarchical or republican. From another point of view they may be described as having presidential or parliamentary executives.

Though the institution of monarchy is as old as re­corded history, the modern age has been moving steadily in the direction of republican government. Today, there are fewer than 30 monarchies. Many monarchs, as in Great Britain, Japan, the Scandinavian countries, and the Low Countries, are best described as constitutional monarchs; they are mainly titular heads of state and do not in fact possess important powers of government. Most of the executive powers are in the hands of ministers, headed by a prime minister, who are politically responsi­ble to the parliament and not to the monarch. The exec­utive powers of government in Great Britain, for exam­ple, are exercised by ministers who hold their offices by virtue of the fact that they command the support of a majority in the popularly elected House of Commons. The monarch can act only on the advice of the ministers and cannot exercise an independent will. In a country with a stable two-party system, all the monarch can do is offer the prime ministership to the leader of the majori­ty party. A constitutional monarch is the head of the state, not of the government.

In a few monarchies, however — for example, those of Jordan and Saudi Arabia — the king exercises real powers of government. The ministers are chosen by and are responsible only to the king rather than to some elective parliamentary body. Hereditary rulers with this degree of personal power were quite common in the 18th century, but they are rare today.

Far more significant than the distinction between monarchy and republicanism is the contrast between pres­idential and parliamentary executives. Since the United States has for long been the world’s leading exponent of presidential government and Great Britain the oldest and most successful practitioner of parliamentary government, their systems may be taken as models with which the systems of other countries can be compared.

The U.S. system is based upon a strict concept of separation of powers: the executive, legislative, and judicial powers of government are vested by the Constitution in three separate branches. The president is not selected by Congress, nor is he a member of Congress. He has a fixed term of office of four years, and he holds it no matter how his legislative program fares in Congress and whether or not his political party controls either or both houses of Congress. The members of the Cabinet are chosen by the president and are politically responsible to him. The Constitution does not permit them to be members of Congress; it provides that “no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office”.

The parliamentary executive system proceeds upon different assumptions. In Great Britain, whose system many countries have chosen to emulate, the executive officers of the state are not entirely separated from the legislative branch. On the contrary, the British Cabinet may be described as the leading committee of Parliament. Although the prime minister, the head of the government, could at one time hold a seat in either the House of Lords or the House of Commons, the contemporary convention is membership in the House of Commons. The other ministers who make up the Cabinet must be members of one or the other house of Parliament. If the prime minister wants someone who is not in Parliament to serve in the Cabinet, he must either appoint him to the peerage or find a vacancy in the House of Commons to which he can be elected.

There are some hybrid forms of government that combine features of both presidential and parliamentary systems. France’s Fifth Republic (1958) is a good example. The French system of government is neither presidential nor parliamentary in form; it combines elements of both in a unique fashion.

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