Comparing Analysis on the Political System between the UK and the USA

Comparing Analysis on the Political System between the UK and
the USA
Abstract: The UK and the USA both are typical western democratic countries, but the design of the form of government in the two countries’political system is widely different, respectively being the typical represent of parliamentary system and presidential system, which reflects how the different social economies and traditions of history and culture uniquely influences the political superstructure. At the same time, as the important fruition of the western political modernization, the political systems of the two countries also jointly embody the typical theory of the checking and balancing of power in the thoughts of western politics, but they have different forms in different social environments. It will absorb some experience that is beneficial to the development of China politics to research this complicated relationships between the UK and the USA.
Key words: compare; political system; the checking and balancing of power
The UK and the USA both are typical western democratic countries which have complete and mature modern democratic consultation system. But in the same frame of democratic politics, the design of the form of government in the two countries is absolutely different. In the UK, the king or queen is the official head of state, but the King or Queen is only a figure head without any real authority. The United States is a federal constitutional republic, in which the President of the United States (the head of state and head of government), the Congress, and the Judiciary share powers reserved to the national government, and the federal government shares sovereignty with the state governments. The UK implements mixed monarchy, and the USA has established the presidential republic. The form of government involves many problems of parallel power in political structure, therefore, the different design of political system actually reflects the different way to distribute the power in political systems. With the same purpose to remain the steady of the political system, more important, to attain the benefits for themselves, political parties and departments have no choice but to obey the unwritten conventions. Here comes the problem: Why can the two different ways to distribute powers achieve the same purpose? What is the reason why the differences and similarities can exist together? To answer these questions, the analysis must be founded in proper basics.
一、The differences of political systems between the UK and the USA
The form of the government of the UK is a typical constitutional monarchy, whose main features are the combination of “virtual” and “real” and “The Parliament comes first”. The feature that the Parliament comes first is everywhere in the political system of the UK, being signified firstly in the relationships of the King and the Cabinet. Although the King or Queen is the head of state, their power is symbolic. The government is elected by people and governs according to British constitutional principles. The King’s or the Queen’s power can only be used in a restricted
way that they must obey the laws and convention. The Parliament and the Cabinet hold the real political power, but the Parliament consists of the Crown, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. However, the monarchy is usually regarded as a separate institution because even though the King or Queen must consent to pass a law, that consent is given as a matter of course. The House of Lords, sometimes referred to as the Upper House, consists of life peers who are granted noble titles by the King or Queen on the Prime Minister, a limited number of 26 Church of England archbishops and bishops, and elected hereditary peers. Like the King, it only has the representative power. The House of Commons, though often referred to as the Lower House, is the center of Parliamentary power. It controls the legislative power, right of supervision, and economic power. With the permission of the king, the Cabinet is formed by leaders of political parties which hold the majority in Parliament, and its members must be MP. The Cabinet has responsibilities to the majority of the House of Commons, and if the House of Commons passed a motion of no confidence to the Cabinet, the Cabinet will resign, or the Cabinet can submit an application to dissolve the House of Commons and restart general election. This is an aspect of the “real”. A respect of “virtual”is that political parties which hold the majority in the House of Commons will become the opposition party, which is protected by laws, assembling the shadow cabinet in peacetime to supervise the ruling party. This abundantly embodies the dynamic balance of the “virtual” and the “real”. The other feature of the political system of the UK is “Parliament comes first”, and that is to say the legislative power is the nucleus of those three powers. The Executive and the Judiciary are both parts of the Legislature. In fact, the executive power and the jurisdiction derive from the legislative power, with these three powers overlapping interactively. The Cabinet, which is mentioned at first, is this principle’s reflection on the relationship of executive power and legislative power. The House of Lords is the Supreme Court of the UK, having the rights of appealing and dominating the criminal offences and the civil cases except criminal offences of Scotland. Chief justice, being equal to the speaker of the House of Lords, is a member of the Cabinet and the ruling party.
The USA is a typical presidential republic country. The political system is based on three main principles: federalism, the separation of powers and respect for the Constitution and the rule of law. Separation of powers means constitutional division of powers among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. In America, this principle means more than allocating legislative power to Congress, executive power to President and judicial power to the Supreme Court. It also means give each branch constitutional and political independence and checks and balances that ensure each of the three branches a sufficient role in the action of the others so that no one branch may dominate the others. The branches must work together if government business is to be performed. In brief, there are three features of its political system. Firstly, the President acts as the head of the state and also the head of government, controlling the executive power under the system of division of checks and balances. Secondly, the President is the centre of the administrative system. Thirdly, the President, the Congress and the Federal Court are independent to each other, and mutually restrict to each other. So the presidential republic does not mean president holds supreme powers. On the contrary, each branch has powers that the others do not have and each branch has a way of counteracting and limiting any wrongful action by other branches. The key of this balance is that the checking and balancing between the executive power and the legislative power. The mutual effect of the judicial power and the legislative power also plays an important role in the political system. The Congress ratifies the President to appoint the
judge of the Supreme Court. The President may be impeached by the Congress, but he can adjudicate unconstitutional law which has come into force by the power of investigating unconstitutional acts. Thus it can be seen, the most obvious characteristic of the power relationships in the form of the government of the USA is that the federal government is divided into three equal and separate branches and they are checked and balanced by one another, with the Constitution of the United States placed above them. It indicates that these three powers in the form of government of the USA stem from the constitution, which is different from the political system of the UK, the executive power and judicial power both being derived from the legislative power.
二、The similarities of political systems between the UK and the USA
Though the arrangement of parallel power in the political system of the two countries is different, it implies a common ground that they are trying to achieve the purpose of the checking and balancing of power so as to attain the benefits of different political parties. The checking and balancing of power has become a widespread theory, which guides the design of the political system in the West, not having discrepancy of country name. The different structure of organizations in the political systems of the UK and the USA is only a means to achieve the checking and balancing power. These organizations may not completely establish the system of checks and balances, and may exist different degrees of power’s imbalance, for example, the legislative power goes above everything else in the political system of the UK. The reason why they still can achieve the same purpose of the checking and balancing of power is that they have built a perfect system of political parties to fit in it. Political parties are the acting mainstay of each organization in the political system. They put their interest demand into the operating of power to achieve the checking and balancing of different power organizations, when different political parties have been the master of different organizations. So, to realize the balance of different power organizations, any forms of the division of three powers must be based on the balance of political parties. Though the form of democratic systems of the West differs from one another, the West can balance powers perfectly, and the reason of it is that they have formed a dynamic system that a bourgeois reformism political party and a bourgeois conservatism political party take turns to be in power, being interactive to each other. Revolution is a means used by bourgeoisie to establish the modern democratic system. After the democratic system has established, this compete for powers developed into the competition and compromise in different political factions. Concretely, in the UK, they are the Conservative Party and the Labor Party; in the USA, they are the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
In the UK, the power to run the country lies in the elected Parliament. The British Parliament operates on a two-party system, which means that two political parties play the role of the Government and the Oppositions. The party whose political ideas are welcome by the majority will be elected and consequently empowered to form the government. Each party has a local organization in the constituency, whose main task is to choose the candidate and help them win. Though the ruling party has the ability to make the policy meet their interest by controlling the Parliament, they still have to consider about the interest of the other classes, groups. Only in this way, can they avoid losing too much votes because of the effect brought by the other party and public opinions. In the other hand, the affect of the opposition party is very important. Firstly, the
political party, who won the most votes in the election of the House of Commons, will be the legal opposition party, supervising the ruling party. Secondly, the opposition party can not attack the ruling party with sharp words just for their own interest. They should come up with a appropriate constructive policy which can take the place of the ruling party’s policy. In that way, the opposition party not only serves as a monitor, but also maintains the continuity of a policy. At the same time, the system of the Shadow Cabinet makes sure that there would not be a long-term anarchy after the ruling party lost the support of people and was overturned by the “Last Power”. So the political stability can be maintained. Therefore, two parties’ legal competition in the frame of capitalist system has made up the imbalance of power which was caused by the authority of legislative power.
The two-party system of the USA dates back to the argument about federal system and anti-federal system in early stage of founding. The original two parties are federal party and anti-federal party. The federal system of the USA is a political compromise between centralism and localism, the purpose of which is to safeguard the interests of the independent countries of the North America. Therefore, there exists a double system of checking and balancing. One is the separation of three powers, which exists in both federation and states, and the other one is the checking and balancing in the federation and states. The federal level’s checking and balancing reflects the balance of the federation and states, which is the basis of the checking and balancing between two parties. Two parties can hold different organizations through elections. There are many kinds of elections in the US. When an American votes on Election Day in the presidential election each leap year, he is at the same time voting in several other elections as well. He is also voting for a Representative or a Senator. Voting in the United States is a two-step process: registering to vote at one time and then casting his or her ballot at another. Elections in the United States are very complex. Taking the election of President for example, we may divide it into four stages. First, the major parties hold conventions to choose candidates for President and Vice President and to determine the parties’ platforms. Once the presidential candidates of the major parties are selected, the general election comes to the second stage, the campaigning stage. The third stage is the time for voters to choose a slate of presidential electors in their state who make up the Electoral College. Finally, the candidate who wins the majority of the 538 Electoral College votes will be the President in the next four years. As a matter of fact, only the candidates of the two major parties have the chance to win the general election though all political parties can put their candidates for President and Vice President. The two major parties are the carrier of this system of checking and balancing, and they play an important role in gathering the interests of voters into state organizations, monitoring the President can set forth a appropriate policy to safeguard these interests.
Conclusion: The political systems of the UK and the USA are important fruition of the political modernization in the West. Through the comparison, we can find that the arrangement of the parallel powers in the two countries’political systems is very different. The UK pursues constitutional monarchy. It is the powerless king or queen who is in the top floor of power. As for the real power, the legislative power is supreme, and the executive power and the judiciary power are equal and parallel. The USA is a typical presidential republic. The three powers in the political systems are completely parallel, and the Constitution of the United States goes above everything else. Though the two countries have many differences in political system, they still connect close
in many aspects. They both have established a system of checking and balancing of power, which should be taken into consideration by many developing countries.
摘要：英国、美国都是典型的西方民主制国家，但两国政治制度中的政体设计却各有不同，分别成为了议会制、总统制的典型代表，反映出两国不同的社会经济和历史文化传统对政治上层建筑的独特影响。

同时，作为西方政治现代化的重要成果，两国的政治制度又共同体现了西方政治思想中的权力制衡的经典理论，只是在不同的社会环境中具有了不同的形式。

而探寻这种不同与相同的关系，可以得出有益于中国政治发展的经验。

关键词：比较；政治制度；权力制衡。