Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What are the branches of government?
Complete separation of powers systems are almost always presidential, although theoretically this need not be the case. There are a few historical exceptions, such as the Directoire system of revolutionary France. Switzerland offers an example of non-Presidential separation of powers today: It is run by a seven-member executive branch, the Federal Council. However, some might argue that Switzerland does not have a strong separation of powers system, as the Federal Council is appointed by parliament (but not dependent on parliament) and although the judiciary has no power of review, the judiciary is still separate from the other branches.
Australia does not maintain a strict separation between the legislative and executive branches of government—indeed, government ministers are required to be members of parliament—but the federal judiciary strictly guards its independence from the other two branches. However, under influence from the American constitution, the Australian constitution does define the three branches of government separately, and this has been interpreted by the judiciary to induce an implicit separation of powers. State governments have a similar level of separation of power, but this is generally on the basis of convention, rather than constitution.
The Founding Fathers of the United States favoured a bicameral legislature. The idea was to have the Senate be wealthier and wiser. Benjamin Rush saw this though, and noted that "this type of dominion is almost always connected with opulence". The Senate was created to be a stabilising force, elected not by mass electors, but selected by the State legislators. Senators would be more knowledgeable and more deliberate—a sort of republican nobility—and a counter to what Madison saw as the "fickleness and passion" that could absorb the House.
The Senate has 100 members with each state having two senators, elected at-large to six-year terms; one-third of Senate seats are up for election every other year. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories do not have senators. The President serves a four-year term and may be elected to the office no more than twice. The President is not elected by direct vote, but by an indirect electoral college system in which the determining votes are apportioned to the states and the District of Columbia. The Supreme Court, led by the Chief Justice of the United States, has nine members, who serve for life.
Germany has a parliamentary system of government in which the chancellor is the nation's leading political figure and "de facto" chief executive. The president has a mainly ceremonial role, but he can give direction to general political and societal debates and has some important "reserve powers" in case of political instability (such as those provided for by Article 81 of the Basic Law). The German presidents have wide discretion about how they exercise their official duties.
The Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known internationally as the UK Parliament, British Parliament, or Westminster Parliament, and domestically simply as Parliament, is the supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom, and the British Overseas Territories. It alone possesses legislative supremacy and thereby ultimate power over all other political bodies in the UK and the overseas territories. Parliament is bicameral but has three parts, consisting of the Sovereign (the Queen-in-Parliament), the House of Lords, and the House of Commons (the primary chamber). The two houses meet in the Palace of Westminster in the City of Westminster, one of the inner boroughs of the capital city, London.
The federal nature of the Commonwealth and the structure of the Parliament of Australia were the subject of protracted negotiations among the colonies during the drafting of the Constitution. The House of Representatives is elected on a basis that reflects the differing populations of the States. Thus New South Wales has 48 members while Tasmania has only five. But the Senate is elected on a basis of equality among the States: all States elect 12 Senators, regardless of population. This was intended to allow the Senators of the smaller States to form a majority and thus be able to amend or reject bills originating in the House of Representatives. The ACT and the NT each elect two Senators.
According to the constitution, the office of the 'Commander in Chief' is represented in the spiritual entity of the Grand National Assembly. The Chief of the General Staff is appointed by the President as the Commander of the Armed Forces. The Council of Ministers is responsible to the Grand National Assembly for national security and the preparation of the Turkish Armed Forces to defend the country. However, the authority to declare a state of war and send the Turkish Armed Forces to foreign countries or allow foreign armed forces to be stationed in Turkey require a vote of approval from the Turkish Parliament.
Representative democracy (also indirect democracy, representative government or psephocracy) is a type of democracy founded on the principle of elected officials representing a group of people, as opposed to direct democracy. Nearly all modern Western-style democracies are types of representative democracies; for example, the United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy, France is a unitary state, and the United States is a federal republic.
In Dutch politics the term dualism is used to refer to the separation of powers between the cabinet and parliament. In this respect, the way the Dutch cabinets function is somewhat semi-presidential in its system of government, not parliamentary. Unlike the presidential system, the legislative branch consists of the cabinet together with the parliament and cabinets are formed on basis of a majority in parliament. Unlike the Westminster parliamentary system, cabinet ministers cannot be members of parliament. An important political issue is whether ministers and leaders of governing parliamentary parties should prepare important political decisions. According to the dualistic position, members of parliament of governing parties should function independently of their cabinet. The term monism is used to refer to a stance that important decisions should be prepared by the members of the governing coalition in order to promote political stability.
There is no provision for the role of political parties in the United States Constitution, since the Founding Fathers did not originally intend for American politics to be partisan. In Federalist Papers No. 9 and No. 10, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, respectively, wrote specifically about the dangers of domestic political factions. Thus in the first two presidential elections, the Electoral College handled the nominations and elections in 1789 and 1792 that selected George Washington. The beginnings of the American two-party system then emerged from Washington's immediate circle of advisors. Hamilton and Madison, who wrote the aforementioned Federalist Papers against political factions, ended up being the core leaders in this partisanship: Hamilton became the leader of Federalist Party while Madison co-helmed the Democratic-Republican Party with Thomas Jefferson.
The position is provided for by Section 17 of the Constitution of Australia. The Senate elects one of its members as president at the start of each new term, or whenever the position is vacant. This is usually—though not necessarily—a member of the party or coalition that holds the most seats in the Senate. The largest party in the Senate is not always the governing party, as government is determined by the House of Representatives. The President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives may consequently be from different parties.
The Government of Serbia was formed on 15 May 2007 after three-month-long negotiations and fierce political scandals and fighting that much disturbed the population, and exactly seven minutes before midnight when the three-month constitutional deadline would pass. It is formed by the Democratic Party (including the minority Sanjak Democratic Party), the coalition of the Democratic Party of Serbia and New Serbia, and G17 Plus. The DS, DSS-NS and G17+ parliamentary clubs elected the new cabinet proposed by Vojislav Koštunica (DSS), the previous Prime Minister, with the further support of some of the minorities (List for Sanjak and Roma Union of Serbia) votes accumulating 133 of the parliament's 250 seats. The Cabinet was sworn shortly before midnight, the deadline, in front of Milutin Mrkonjić (SPS), the temporary acting Speaker. The five new Ministers (Dragan Šutanovac, Božidar Đelić, Milan Marković, Mlađan Dinkić and Dušan Petrović) that were Deputies in the parliament have immediately filed their resignations, as per the Constitution which disables a Minister to be an active member in the National Assembly.
The bicameral Parliament of Australia consists of two Houses, the lower house is called the House of Representatives and the upper house is named the Senate. The lower house currently consists of 150 members, each elected from single member constituencies, known as electoral divisions (commonly referred to as "electorates" or "seats") using full-preference Instant-runoff voting. This tends to lead to the chamber being dominated by two major parties, the Liberal/National Coalition and the Labor Party. The government of the day must achieve the confidence of this House to gain and hold power.
Although Jordan is a constitutional monarchy, the king is vested with considerable executive and legislative powers. He is commander-in-chief of the Jordanian Armed Forces and appoints the prime minister and the directors of security agencies. He also appoints the members of the upper house, the Senate, as well as the members of the Constitutional Court.
Third parties, meaning a party other than one of the two dominant parties, are possible in two-party systems, but they are often unlikely to exert much influence by gaining control of legislatures or by winning elections. While there are occasional opinions in the media expressed about the possibility of third parties emerging in the United States, for example, political insiders such as the 1980 presidential candidate John Anderson think the chances of one appearing in the early twenty-first century is remote. A report in "The Guardian" suggested that American politics has been "stuck in a two-way fight between Republicans and Democrats" since the Civil War, and that third-party runs had little meaningful success.
In the UK and Canada, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the respective upper house of parliament. The leader of the majority party in the House of Commons usually becomes the prime minister. Since 2010 the House of Commons of the United Kingdom has had 650 elected members, and since 2015 the House of Commons of Canada has had 338 members. The Commons' functions are to consider through debate new laws and changes to existing ones, authorise taxes, and provide scrutiny of the policy and expenditure of the Government. It has the power to give a Government a vote of no confidence.
The defining example of the Necessary and Proper Clause in U.S. history was "McCulloch v. Maryland" in 1819. The United States Constitution says nothing about establishing a national bank. The U.S. government established a national bank that provided part of the government's initial capital. In 1819 the federal government opened a national bank in Baltimore, Maryland. In an effort to tax the bank out of business, the government of Maryland imposed a tax on the federal bank. James William McCulloch, a cashier at the bank, refused to pay the tax. Eventually the case was heard before the U.S. Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Marshall held that the power of establishing a national bank could be implied from the U.S. constitution. Marshall ruled that no state could use its taxing power to tax an arm of the national government.
During the transition from monarchy to republic, the constitutional balance of power shifted from the executive (the Roman king) to the Roman Senate. When the Roman Republic was founded in 509 BC, the powers that had been held by the king were transferred to the Roman consuls, of which two were to be elected each year. Magistrates of the republic were elected by the people of Rome, and were each vested with a degree of power called "major powers" ("maior potestas"). Dictators had more "major powers" than any other magistrate, and after the Dictator was the censor, and then the consul, and then the praetor, and then the curule aedile, and then the quaestor. Any magistrate could obstruct ("veto") an action that was being taken by a magistrate with an equal or lower degree of magisterial powers. By definition, plebeian tribunes and plebeian aediles were technically not magistrates since they were elected only by the plebeians, and as such, .
The Roman Republic was the first known government in the western world to have a representative government, despite taking the form of a direct government in the Roman assemblies. The Roman model of governance inspired many political thinkers over the centuries, and today's modern representative democracies imitate more the Roman than the Greek models because it was a state in which supreme power was held by the people and their elected representatives, and which had an elected or nominated leader. Representative democracy is a form of democracy in which people vote for representatives who then vote on policy initiatives as opposed to a direct democracy, a form of democracy in which people vote on policy initiatives directly. A European medieval tradition of selecting representatives from the various estates (classes, but not as we know them today) to advise/control monarchs led to relatively wide familiarity with representative systems inspired by Roman systems.
India is a federal union comprising 29 states and 7 union territories. All states, as well in addition to the union territories of Puducherry and the National Capital Territory of Delhi, have elected legislatures and governments following on the Westminster system of governance. The remaining five union territories are directly ruled by the centre through appointed administrators. In 1956, under the States Reorganisation Act, states were reorganised on a linguistic basis. Since then, their structure has remained largely unchanged. Each state or union territory is further divided into administrative districts. The districts are further divided into tehsils and ultimately into villages.
Mongolia is divided administratively into 21 "aimags" (provinces) according to Article 57 of the Constitution. The Constitution vests the governor and parliament of the provinces with self-administrative powers.
The legislative branch of the government of Puerto Rico is responsible for enacting, amending, and repealing the laws of Puerto Rico. Article III of the Constitution of Puerto Rico vests the legislative power on the Legislative Assembly—which together with other agencies form the legislative branch. Article IV vests the executive power on the Governor —whom by its nature forms the executive branch— while Article V vests the judicial power on the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico—which by its nature forms the judicial branch. Although the Constitution does not establish such law, the legislative branch is also composed of other agencies which are subject to the Legislative Assembly but are not part of it.
The Constitution also partially prevents the government from expanding its own power by creating a system of checks and balances through the separation of powers. Articles One, Two, and Three of the Constitution create three separate branches of government, equal in level power, but different in responsibility, that all control the government. In assuming each branch would want to expand its powers, it was necessary that each have the ability to fend off power grabs from other branches. The three branches—legislative, executive, and judicial— compete with each other through certain powers that allow them to “check” the others and “balance” the government. Examples of this include the legislative branch's power to override Presidential Vetoes and the judicial branch's power to declare laws created by the legislative branch unconstitutional. James Madison writes in Federalist No. 51 “But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others.” Without the capacity of each branch to check the others, power would concentrate with a small minority and could potentially allow the minority to infringe upon the rights of the people. This would be antithetical to the purpose of the Constitution, hence a system of checks and balances was set in place.
Despite the uncertainty of Hamilton's original message, the executive branch has played a major role in the United States since its genesis. The Executives have become known as the "most dangerous" branch of government because they are the main decision makers regarding all national policies and ideas. The legislative and judiciary branches assist in those decisions, but the president - along with Congress - make the final judgments. To the public, the power seems to remain within the Executives, which goes against what Hamilton originally addressed in Federalist 67, but it also shows the division of branches and their capability.
The administrative agencies that are funded from public money may exercise powers granted by Congress. Without appropriate controls and oversight this practice may result in a bureaucracy (in the original literal sense). Some critics have argued that a central paradox at the heart of the American political system is democracy's reliance on what the critics view as undemocratic bureaucratic institutions that characterize the administrative agencies of government.