Types of government

The ranking here is according to the Democracy Index by the Economist's Intelligence Unit. They examine the state of democracy in 167 countries: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation and political culture.

The ideal seems to emphasize democracy and human rights with a level of individual economic security.

World's states colored by form of government as of April 2006.

The main idea of a presidential system is that the people elect a legislature, but they also elect a head of state who is also the head of government, aka, the president. Often the legislature passes laws, including budgets, and the president administers them.

The main idea of a parliamentary system is that the people elect a legislature, and the leader of the largest party becomes prime minister. The budget is administered by ministers accountable to the prime minister.

How does a parliamentary system work? Below, you'll find a case study of the parliamentary system in the Netherlands. But first, let's understand the basic terminology.

Political Spectrum

If you follow what's going on with governments and elections, you know that the terminology can be confusing: conservative, liberal, socialist, capitalist. When anything is complex or confusing, I try to visualize it, make a picture of the parts and how they relate. When anything is both complex and confusing, visualization is the best way to make sense of it.

For something as pervasive and important as politics, the complexity and confusion are worse. I'll define politics as power. Who decides how the benefits and burdens of human living together -- society -- will be distributed?

Benefits - things like police protection and due process.
Burdens - things like taxes and military service.

People who study politics have proposed many visualizations of what is usually called the political spectrum to acknowledge that just as the rainbow has millions of separate colors, so our political life has myriad fine shadings.

As usual, the Wikipedia has a thorough overview and several visualizations. Because these are visualizations, they cannot be objective; they make trade-offs between competing values and contexts, that is, the ideas of the people making the visualizations.

One Axis

The simplest visualization is a line, one dimension, with a left end and a right end. In the U.S., with only two viable political parties (a rarity among nations), that simple visualization is the most common. Internationally, there is no firm consensus about the meaning of left-wing and right-wing.

Wikipedia's Left-right politics

As a visualization, the one-dimensional left-right political spectrum originated over two hundred years ago in the French Assembly (right) when the representatives of the aristocracy sat to the right of the speaker facing them and the representatives of the common people sat to the left. The two sides had sharply contrasting ideas about the pace of change and the distribution of benefits and burdens. The aristocracy wanted slow change, if any, and the common people wanted lots of quick change. Both sides wanted to maximize their share of the burdens and increase their share of the benefits. Close study of that era quickly shows the inadequacy of that simplification even then.

However, if you don't want to be looking at a society too closely and want to quickly establish a relationship between two people or events or ideas, then the simple left/right distinction is useful. In any event, it is very common.

Two Axes

The next step up in complexity is a rectangle, two dimensions. With two axes instead of one, the question becomes what do you put on them? If one axis is economics, what should the other be? How much government? How much personal liberty? As you can see on the Wikipedia page, various models try a variety of combinations of axes.

The second axis lets the visualizer emphasize only some aspects of the overall complexity. The disadvantage is that it takes more thought to place a person, event, or an idea on the rectangle.

For example, the World's Smallest Political Quiz (smallest in the sense of quickest) will place you on a two-dimensional spectrum with personal issues on one axis and economic issues on the other.

Three Axes

As tempting as a fourth dimension would be, the most complex political visualizations have three dimensions, either cubes or circles. The third axis enables many combinations of social and economic factors. Faith versus reason? Individual versus institution? Because three dimensions are hard to represent on two-dimensional media ("pages"), they are rare. In addition, the placement of a person, event, or idea gets even more nuanced in three dimensions.

What's behind it?

People. What are we? Responsible and resilient? Fragile and in need of assistance? In need of strong leaders? Of course, you know people who would fit all three. Perhaps at any given time in your life, you have been all three, too. However, let's look at a specific question:

Should the arts be supported by taxes?

You don't ask that about the military because none of the options to a tax-funded, government-run army are good ideas. If a country's one central government doesn't finance its one army, what are the alternatives? Each local police becomes a local army? Each family is on its own? Every home is a fort? That sounds like a tribe, not a nation.

However, we don't think about the arts in the same way. Just like the miliarty, the arts often involve expensive materials and they always involve someone's time, often after a long training period. Who should pay for that?

If people are responsible and resilient, shouldn't the market decide? That is, if people would rather listen to Eric Clapton play guitar instead of me, shouldn't he make a lot of money and I pay to listen? What's the alternative -- in the name of fairness and equality, we should force you to listen to me first so that you can then listen to Eric Clapton?

If people are fragile and in need of assistance, should something other than market value decide? Let's say that the young ladies in the photo above right want to devote their lives to learning and teaching the angklung, one of the thousands of traditional instruments that various societies have developed. Should they have to live on lessons given to people who can afford to pay them? Should the government provide a modest salary so that they can teach everyone, regardless of ability to pay? What's the alternative -- letting the sounds of the angklung completely die out, to never be heard again except on YouTube? Of course, we should support people willing to preserve non-commercial but culturally important musical instruments. The question is, who should pay for it if the market won't?

For this course

The visualization of the political spectrum that I find most relevant to this course has three dimensions: political, economic, and social.

Note that liberal, in the rest of the world, means favoring the individual. Only in the U.S. is it the opposite of conservative. For example, Ronald Reagan was very liberal in the economic sense. Dozens of countries have a party that is labeled liberal-conservative, with no feeling of contradiction.

The table above titles them left and right, but that distinction loses its meaning in the second (up/down) and third (close/far) dimensions. As you can see from the contoured blue and red meshes above, there are a lot of nuanced positions to take on issues in three dimensions.

U.S. system

In the U.S. two party-system, one of the parties controls the legislature and often the other party controls the executive branch. Because there are only two, it is easy to put them on one line, next to each other. We usually put the Democrats on the "left" and the Republicans on the "right".

In the last century, there was quite a bit of overlap. The left-most Republicans were further left than the right-most Democrats.

Increasingly today, all the Republicans are to the right of all the Democrats. There is no incentive for the parties to agree. The out-party's goal is to win the next election, not to govern, and the in-party's goal is exactly the same. They know the next election is coming on a fixed schedule, and the parties give enormous amounts of money to a few big media companies, some of which are owned by foreign corporations, to help them persuade the electorate to vote for them.

The U.S. also has a presidential system, whereby a separate branch of government runs the bureaucracy, including the military. The legislature makes the laws and appropriates the budget, and the separate and often opposing executive (president) makes the policies and spends the money.

Dutch system

In the Dutch system, similar to the other industrialized nations, ten parties have representatives in Parliament, and several others have recently held seats or soon may again. With that many parties, it is impossible to put them all on one line, and those who try often have them in a slightly different order.

Thus, instead of two parties next to each other and in opposition to each other, the Dutch have a dozen parties that are best conceived in a 3-D box. As you can see from this 2-D pie chart (above) of the 2006-2010 representation in Parliament, none of the parties has more than 30% support. This pie chart does not try to do more than put the progressive parties on the left and the others on the right. The largest single party was the CDA, the Christian Democratic Appeal. The dark-blue slice to the right of CDA is the liberal party, the VVD, the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie). Its policies are closest to the US Democratic party and most members of the US Republican party. To the right of that are the anti-immigration party (PVV) and the ultra-religious right (yes, the Netherlands has a Bible Belt).

The political football field

In the diagram above, the brighter dark-blue slice on the right is the liberal party, the VVD, whose policies are the closest the Dutch get to the U.S. Democratic party. That means that Jan Peter Balkenende, the previous leader of the large center party in the Netherlands, the CDA, was to the left of President Obama on every single policy issue.

After the CDA, the next two largest Dutch parties until 2010 were the PvdA, the Labor Party (Partij van de Arbeid), which is part of the international socialist movement, and the SP, Socialist Party (Socialistische Partij). Together, those two parties, way to the left of President Obama, got almost forty percent of the vote during the 2006 Dutch national election.

Another way of saying that, from the Dutch point of view: if politics in the Netherlands is operating on a full football field, politics in the U.S. is taking place only on the far right half of that field and is heading in the direction of falling off the right edge (from the left) or scoring a touchdown (from the right).

Here's the same thing from the US point of view: the vast majority of the Dutch populace embraces and defends political, social, and economic policies that are far, far to the left of President Obama. To go in that direction, in the US, is to go off to the far-left lunatic fringe. Yet the Netherlands is a prosperous country. Of the 34 "first world" countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the U.S. is farthest to the right on the political and economic axes as well as most of the social issues. You can also compare the U.S. and the Netherlands to the countries in the developing world that we are studying for this course.

Case Study

The Dutch Government Collapses

What's going on in the Netherlands? Well, early one Saturday morning two years ago, February 20, 2010, the government collapsed. How can a government collapse?

I don't think the U.S. government has ever collapsed! What does a government look like after it collapses? Is it like a revolution? What happens next to put it back together?

Dutch May Take Months to Form New Cabinet After Latest Collapse

Dutch political leaders may take months to form a new coalition after the government collapsed for a fifth time since 2002 over troops in Afghanistan, as rising support for an anti-immigrant party limits their options.

Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende’s three-party Cabinet was broken up Feb. 20 after Finance Minister Wouter Bos’s Labor Party refused to go along with a NATO request to keep Dutch troops in the Afghan province of Uruzgan beyond this year.

Several parts of those sentences indicate things that are different than in the U.S. Even if you don't keep up with Dutch politics, a knowledge of how parliamentary systems work will give you a lot of context for understanding what is happening in the Netherlands.

Some context

The British magazine The Economist has published the Democracy Index to rate and rank 167 of the world's countries in five areas: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation and political culture. The countries are grouped into 30 full democracies, 50 flawed democracies, 36 hybrid regimes, and 51 authoritarian regimes. The Netherlands ranks fourth among the full democracies. All of the eighteen countries ranking higher than the U.S., as well as four of the six countries ranking directly below the U.S., are governed by parliaments with no separation of the executive from the legislature.

That is, 25 of the 30 full democracies, as well as half of the countries that we are studying, have parliaments and prime ministers rather than the separation of powers that the U.S. and Latin American countries have with a separate executive branch. In addition, most of the countries that we are studying have multi-party systems, as opposed to the two-party system in Sri Lanka the United States, the single-party systems in Egypt, Vietnam, China, and then the situation in Saudi Arabian, which as an absolute monarchy has no political parties.

Learn more about the parliamentary system.

A parliament and many political parties

The Dutch have a multi-party parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy. That means that Queen Beatrix (above) is the head of state, and her son Prince Willem-Alexander (below with Maxima and their three daughters a couple of years ago; do they look Dutch or what?) is her heir apparent. She is only the sixth monarch since 1815, when the modern monarchy was imposed by Napoleon. The monarch has limited powers, mostly during the formation of a new cabinet and her yearly Speech from the Throne on Prinsjesdag (Princes' Day).

The photo to the right shows Mauritshuis, the lighter colored building, housing the amazing Royal art collection, and the Parliament buildings. The Prime Minister's office is on the second floor of the hexagonal building next to Mauritshuis. The Dutch have two houses of Parliament, the Eerste Kamer, or upper house, and the Tweede Kamer, or second house. When this discussion refers to "Parliament" it means only the Tweede Kamer.

The Dutch hold parliamentary elections every four years unless the government collapses before then. To be more specific, we should say unless the governing coalition collapses.

The process of national elections for a new parliament

First, each party develops a fresh set of positions (standpunten) on the issues and publishes it on their web site. (Standpunten: CDA, PvdA, D66, SP, Groen Links). An election campain lasts about two months, features lots of televised free-for-all debates with a dozen people around a table, and costs a tiny fraction of what US campaigns cost. The members of Parliament spend hardly any time in the fund-raising and lobbyist-pleasing activities that their US counterparts say consumes from a third to a half of their time.

The Dutch use the D'Hondt method of the party-list proportional representation system. In the U.S., we use the first past the post method of the plurality voting system.

A very popular website in the Netherlands, StemWijzer (Vote Chooser - English-language version), asks a series of questions about current issues and then ranks the parties by how close their positions are to the person answering the questions. Party loyalty is low; people switch all the time. The chart below left compiled by Maurice de Hond's polling organization shows the results over the past year when a sampling of Dutch were asked, if the Parliamentary elections were held today, which party would you vote for?

As you can see on the chart below, the Socialist Party (red line) is currently the single most popular party in the Netherlands, although not long ago, it was the fifth most popular.

The voters don't vote for a local representative to Parliament. Instead, each party has a list of people on the ballot. The list is at least as long as the number of seats the party could be expected to win, and often includes local political favorites in an attempt to draw those voters. Each voter votes for one of the names on one of the lists, though most people vote for the first name. In the Netherlands, in excess of 80% of the eligible voters complete a ballot (in the US, it's about 48%, a little higher in presidential election years, closer to 35-40% in off-years, putting the US well down the list of countries by voter turnout.)

The votes are counted by party, not by candidate. The percentages are distributed among the 150 available seats in Parliament. For example, if the CDA candidates get 33% of the vote, they get 33% of the seats, that is, 50. The first 50 names on the CDA list will then enter Parliament, though if someone lower down got a lot of votes, he or she may get elevated; it's a good system for rising party stars.

The key: coalition governments

It has been over a century since one party got more than 50% of the votes, so every government is a coalition. After every election, the monarch talks to the leader of each party that has enough votes for at least one seat. She then asks one of them, usually the one with the largest single bloc of votes, to try to form a coalition of more than 50%. This is an intense, messy process that can take months and several tries after an election. It has almost always involved three or four parties, often far apart on the issues, but willing to work together.

Thus the zero-sum competition in the US cannot happen in the Netherlands. In the US, there's a Democrat/Republican split on every issue. In the Netherlands, there is always compromise. Otherwise, the government couldn't function. In fact, it "collapses" when it can no longer agree on an issue.

In the US, the party holding the presidency may be different from the party controling Congress. The president's cabinet are his hand-picked and trusted advisors, almost always all from his party. In the Netherlands, the eighteen cabinet seats are divided among the three or four parties in the ruling coalition. They don't all agree by any means, but they put their country first over their party, and not getting along is fatal to the coalition, so there is tremendous incentive to compromise and work it out.

When it doesn't work out, when the coalition doesn't hold together on an important issue, the result is not gridlock. The result is that the government "collapses". They hold new elections and start over again to build a workable coalition.

The previous coalition had three parties:

the centrist CDA, with its leader Jan Peter Balkenende as prime minister

the far-left PvdA, with its leader Wouter Bos (below left) as the finance minister

the CU, the Christian Unie, which has only six seats and generally follows the CDA

The Dutch like to play with the big boys internationally, so when NATO asked member countries to send troops to Afghanistan, the Dutch sent about 2,000 in 2006 for a two-year commitment. In 2008, a former Dutch foreign minister was head of NATO and he persuaded the ruling coalition to sign on for another two years. PvdA was against it, but CDA promised, only two more years, so PvdA agreed that Dutch troops would stay until August 2010.

In early 2010, NATO formally asked the Dutch to stay yet another two years. The CDA agreed, but the PvdA said, what about our promise to the people in 2008 that we would stay only two more years?

The difference was enough to cause the PvdA to resign from the cabinet, which means that the government collapsed. If it could no longer agree, it could no longer govern. If it could no longer govern, then it had to go. Queen Beatrix ordered new elections for early June in hopes of having a new cabinet in place before her Speech from the Throne in September.

The Obama adminstration, to say the least, is not amused by the Dutch withdrawal from Afghanistan, especially after our new McChrystal Doctrine was consciously modeled after the less-aggressive but ultimately successful Dutch strategy.

Dutch confirm Afghan troop pullout sparking fears of domino effect
by David Charter
Times Online, February 22, 2010

Although the Dutch endured some sniping from bigger Nato powers about their perceived lack of aggression after they deployed to Uruzgan in 2006, their “population centric” strategy was a precursor of “The McChrystal Doctrine” adopted by British and American forces.

Mr Balkenende faces a general election in May after his main coalition partners, PvdA, the Labour party, walked out rather than break a promise to withdraw the 1,950 Dutch troops this year. Wouter Bos, the Labour leader, said: “A plan was agreed to when our soldiers went to Afghanistan. Our partners in the government did not want to stick to that plan, and on the basis of their refusal we have decided to resign.”

Mr Balkenende’s Christian Democrats and Labour are forecast to lose seats in the 150-member parliament. The two big gainers are forecast to be the ultra-liberals D66 and the right-wing Party of Freedom of the anti-Islamist MP Geert Wilders. Both oppose the Afghan mission.

The Queen did not quite get her wish.

2010 Election Results

Wikipedia's Dutch general election 2010

	Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie - VVD.nl People's Party for Freedom and Democracy on the right closest to the U.S. Republican party. won, barely, with enough votes for 31 seats in the parliament, however, an increase over their previous 22 seats. VVD attracted many voters from the Christian Democrats. Mark Rutte
	Partij van de Arbeid - PvdA.nl Labour Party left-wing socialist labor party won a fifth of the votes, good for 30 seats, down just a couple. Job Cohen
	Partij voor de Vrijheid - PVV.nl Party for Freedom right-wing single-issue anti-Islam party the big surprise, winning 24 seats, way up from the 9 it had. It attracted voters from across the political spectrum concerned about the seeming lack of integration of Muslim immigrants into Dutch society. Geert Wilders
	Christen-Democratisch Appèl - CDA.nl Christian Democratic Appeal center party closest to the U.S. Democratic party lost the most votes, going from the most, 42, to 21 seats. The CDA's leader, Jan Peter Balkenende, retired from politics immediately after the election results were known. Maxime Verhagen
	Socialistische Partij - SP.nl Socialist Party lost big, too, dropping from 25 to 15 seats. It lost many voters to the next two parties. Emile Roemer
	Democrats 66 - D66.nl GroenLinks (GreenLeft) - GroenLinks.nl left-wing parties drew from the SP and doubled their total to 20 seats, 10 each. Alexander Pechtold (D66, right) Femke Halsema (GL, below right) replaced the next December by Jolanda Sap (below left)
	CU - ChristenUnie - Christian Union SGP - Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij - Reformed Political Party PvdD - Partij voor de Dieren - Party for the Animals two right-wing religious parties and the left-wing PvdD enough votes for 7 seats total.

Forming the coalition

Over the summer of 2010, Queen Beatrix appointed a series of older, trusted men, informateurs, to try to form a coalition. The magic number was 76 seats in Parliament, a majority.

Wikipedia's 2010 Dutch cabinet formation

What combinations of parties had at least 76 votes AND the ability to compromise and work with each other well enough to form a governing coalition, preferably one that could stick together for four years?

The problem was Geert Wilders and his anti-Islam party, the PVV. With such a narrow agenda, they aren't really interested in governing or being responsible for for anything beyond their one issue. That's certainly their right. However, the issue is so contentious that Wilders is under protection 24/7/365 by a phalanx of bodyguards and he sleeps in a different place every night. His flamboyant, peroxide style is offensive to many reticent Dutch.

As you can see on the timeline, the only two possible coalitions without PVV were tried in June and July and did not work. The only coalition with him, however, wouldn't work, either.

So the Dutch came up with a solution. It took four months to work it out, about the average time for forming a new government. Several prominent politicians resigned, and the VVD and CDA adjusted their leadership teams.

Officially, there are only two parties in the coalition, VVD and CDA. VVD has not been in a government since World War II. CDA has been in all but one since WWII.

Here's the trick. This coalition, with only 51 seats between them, is officially a "minority" government. But it is governing with the "tolerance" support of the PVV, whose 24 seats gets them exactly to the majority of 75. The two right-wing religious parties are expected to always vote with them.

Mark Rutte, the leader of the VVD, is the new prime minister, replacing Jan Peter Balkenende.

The written agreements to govern

The three parties wrote two documents that were thoroughly publicized. The regerakkoord is the governing agreement, the policies that the coalition is going to support, given all foreseeable circumstances. On all of the important issues, this is how they are going to apportion the national budget and what laws they will vote to pass. The details can change as they go along, but as long as all the parties support the regerakkoord, the coalition governs.

In addition, for this coalition only, there is a gedoogakkoord, the tolerance agreement, which is the much-discussed document whereby PVV agrees to tolerate, that is, support the coalition with all of its votes.

In other words, the Dutch work out their problems before they form a government, not afterwards. When they can't agree, they stop and start over again.

For the immediate future, that leaves the left -- the labor party, the socialists, and the smaller left-wing parties -- in opposition. While they will lose almost every vote, they will be able to shape the details. More importantly, they will have the attention of the public to explain why their positions on the issues are preferable to the positions of the governing majority.

Given the great number of Dutch voters willing to jump parties from one election to the next, no doubt the left will rise again.

The Governing Coalition

Maxime Verhagen CDA - Prime Minister Mark Rutte VVD - Geert Wilders PVV