There are many differing governing arrangements. Democratic government today operates as representative government, where people elect representatives who govern on their behalf.  There are many different governing and power-sharing arrangements possible for democratically elected representative government.

Presidential vs parliamentary government

Presidential systems of government are characterised by the constitutional and political separation of powers and personnel between the legislative and executive branches of government.  Executive power is vested in an independently elected president who is neither directly accountable to, nor removable by, the assembly.  The president cannot be a member of the legislature.

According to Andrew Heywood, there are five principal features of a presidential system:

• The executive and legislature are separately elected, and each has a range of independent constitutional powers.
• There is a single executive; the roles of ‘head of state’ and ‘head of government’ are combined in the office of the president.
• Executive authority rests with the president; the cabinet and ministers merely advise the president and are responsible to him or her.
• There is a formal separation of the personnel of the legislative and executive branches of government.
• Electoral terms are fixed. The president can neither dissolve the legislature nor be dismissed by it.

The USA is the archetypal presidential system, with American-style presidential systems also found in Latin American countries, and in post-communist states such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia.  Cabinet members are not elected, but appointed by the president.   France and Finland are considered to be examples of semi-presidential systems.  Both countries have a separately elected president; but the president presides over a government drawn from, and accountable to, the assembly.

This is in sharp contrast to the parliamentary form of government used in New Zealand, and many other countries around the world including the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, India, Sweden, Australia and Canada.  In this type of government, the executive is organically linked to the legislature.  Legislative and executive power is fused together through the cabinet; the government governs through and in the legislature.

Heywood highlights the main features of the parliamentary system of government:

• Governments are formed as a result of legislative elections, and based on the strength of party representation; the executive is not elected separately.
• The personnel of government come from the assembly, usually from the leaders of the party or parties that have majority control.
• The government is responsible to the assembly in the sense that it must maintain the assembly’s ‘confidence’ and can removed (usually by the lower chamber) if it loses that confidence.
• The government can, in most cases, ‘dissolve’ the assembly, meaning that there is a maximum term of office, but no minimum.
• Parliamentary systems have a split executive: the head of government (usually a prime minister) and a separate head of state (a constitutional monarch or a non-executive president).

Federal vs unitary government

Federalism is a system of government where sovereign power is shared between two levels of government: a national government and several regional governments often called ‘states’ or ‘provinces’.  This division of powers is codified in a written constitution.  Both levels of government have the right to act directly on the citizens, for example, both levels of government can raise taxes.  Each level also has the right to act independently of the other in certain defined areas or ‘jurisdictions’.  The constitution is the contract of federalism; it specifies the separate jurisdictions of each level of government, and the jurisdictions that are shared or ‘concurrent’.  This mix of independence and interdependence of the two levels of government is the hallmark of the federal system of government.

Furthermore, federalism is meant to encourage ‘unity in diversity’.  In large, diverse countries such as Canada, the United States and India, federalism allows cultural, linguistic, ethnic and regional cleavages to be expressed through the regional governments, while still providing a unifying, overarching framework through the national government and constitution.  In its original form, the organisation of the political units in a federal system was on a geographic basis.  It has been suggested that the federal principle of sharing power is also a useful way of expressing pluralism and diversity more generally, even when these differences are not geographically based.

In a unitary system, all sovereign power rests in one level of government – the national or central government.  While some power may be delegated to local authorities, local government is subservient to the national government; the delegation of power from the centre to local governments is at the discretion of the national government and can be withdrawn unilaterally.  New Zealand is a unitary system; all sovereign power rests with Parliament in Wellington.  Local authorities derive their authority from Parliament through the Local Government Act, not from the constitution as is the case in a federal system.

Bicameral versus unicameral

A bicameral system of government also divides power, but between two chambers in the assembly – the lower and upper houses.  Some examples of bicameral legislatures include the Australian Parliament (the House of Representatives and the Senate), the American Congress (also called the House of Representatives and the Senate), and the United Kingdom Parliament (the House of Commons and the House of Lords).  In presidential systems the two houses tend to be equal in power and stature; in parliamentary systems the lower house tends to be dominant as it is the confidence house (the government must hold its confidence in order to remain in power).  Of the 66 countries with upper houses, 48 are elected and 16 are appointed by the government.

Most countries – 115 out of 178, including New Zealand – are unicameral, that is, having only one chamber in the assembly.  This begs the question, why have an upper house?  Historically, some upper houses existed to protect the interests of the upper class from the ‘rabble’ represented in the lower house.  The House of Lords in the United Kingdom, for example, was originally designed to be house of the ‘propertied’ class.  A more common rationale for an upper house is as a ‘sober second thought’; a place where legislation is scrutinised for a second time.  This is thought to improve the quality of legislation and to ease the burden of the lower house.  The second chamber can also act as a conservative restraint on the lower house, thus acting as a break on the executive.

Federal states have a particular reason for having an upper house – to act as the house of federalism.  In many federal countries, members of the upper house are either elected or appointed from the state, province or region as a means of bringing state, provincial or regional representation into the national government.  This can be done on an equal basis (for example the United States Senate has two Senators from each state) or an equitable basis (in Canada’s Senate the smaller provinces are over-represented).  The second chamber can also widen the basis of representation of non-territorial groups such as women, aboriginal peoples and minorities; or of interests not normally found in the lower house, for example the Greens in Australia.  This can be done through the use of quotas or a proportional representation electoral system in the second chamber.