Do parliamentary systems necessarily have episodes when replacement leaders can assume and keep power with very limited popular mandates and appeal?

Question

Note: this isn't a dig at UK govt or promoting other systems. Not even all that much at Truss - I'll add another PM from a different ideological lean if representative of issue.

Just a question about this particular effect in parliamentary systems.

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Let's take two cases, where a new leader was chosen to replace a party's ousted leader:

Liz Truss is appointed PM after 160000 registered Conservatives vote. Of those she got 57% of the votes cast: barely 81k people to get the leader of a country of 67m after taking over from an already unpopular Boris Johnson, with essentially a promise to double down on hardline Conservative policies.

Danielle Smith, in Alberta, Canada gets 40k votes in a province of 4.5m people. She took over from PM Jason Kenney who was widely panned for covid mishandling but, to many people, Smith very much looks like she would have done significantly worse. In a province with a large Ukrainian diaspora, she's on the record stating Putin should get bits of Ukraine.

Smith won by motivating a base of disgruntled Albertans who thought pandemic restrictions unnecessary, cheered on angry truckers' blockades, and believe Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is out to destroy the province's energy industry.

It was a campaign of anger, grievance, conspiracies and retribution — and her supporters loved it.

She promised to fire the board of Alberta Health Services, get rid of socialist public servants and, most notably, introduce an Alberta Sovereignty Act that she says would allow Alberta to ignore federal laws and court decisions deemed to be un-Albertan.

Danielle Smith is new UCP leader — and Alberta's next premier (new window) The party says 82,000 mail-in and in-person votes were cast. About 124,000 members were eligible to vote.

Smith didn't win a landslide: just 42,423 votes. In second place, Travis Toews with 36,480. But it was more than enough.

It's hard to see any election in which these people would be chosen by the larger electorate, rather than a small majority of registered voters from their party. This seems problematic, democracy-wise. For better or worse, Boris Johnson and Jason Kenney were given the nod by electors at large.

Now, I know that people will say, rightly: people didn't elect Boris Johnson, much as Johnson liked to claim a personal mandate.

But that is ignoring that people do in fact vote based on how their perceive a party's leader at election time, because a party's leader has a large say in that party's platform. UK voters rejected Corbyn and Labour's ejecting him afterwards as a result is an implicit recognition of this fact.

Is this occasional tension between a replacement leader's unpopularity and a parliamentary system innate, built-in and unavoidable? Can different procedures and electoral systems avoid it, while remaining parliamentary in nature?

Do secret ballots during votes of confidence modify this? Or is this phenomenon linked to parliaments which only have a limited number of parties? I expect things would look different in Israel for example.

p.s. with my province's premier, John Horgan, leaving for health reasons, BC is faced with the same situation, giving me extra "skin in the game" to be asking about this. Fortunately, BC's provincial NDPs are a reasonable enough lot, making it unlikely we'll have a dysfunctional successor (David Eby has been all but chosen).

Answer 1

By definition, yes.

In an actual parliamentary system, the leader never has a popular mandate. It is always a parliamentary mandate. A leader needs the confidence of the majority of parliament. Leaders can change without a fresh popular election if the new leader can get the support of a majority in the existing parliament.

If one party has a majority, it is a good assumption that a change in the majority party leadership implies a change in the government leadership as well. Unless a no-confidence vote says otherwise.

Parties might run with a "designated PM candidate," but it is always subject to the decision of a parliamentary majority. This becomes more obvious in a more proportional system, where coalitions may be necessary, but in the end it should be understood by everybody that a parliamentary majority may differ from a plurality of the votes. Or even a majority.

Spin doctors and news media might try to personalize the parliamentary election, but that is an oversimplification.

Answer 2

Not necessarily. I would say this problem is most prevalent in Westminster system.

There are many versions of parliamentary systems in the world. All of them require the executive to derive mandate from legislature, but the dynamic varies widely depending on how the system is configured.

Westminster system is unique in the sense that it combines parliamentary system with two-party system. This means that the leader of the winning party usually becomes the leader of executive, making it confusing as to whether the mandate was given to the party leader or the legislature.

Outside of Westminster system, however, this question becomes less important. In other European countries, they prefer to use proportional representation which creates multi-party systems where no party ever wins outright majority. This means that the balance of power resides in the negotiation process in legislature, and whoever becomes PM would be held on a tight leash and can't just act by their personal whim.

In these countries, there is a clear understanding that the party mandate is distinct from any politician's personal mandate. So there is an expectation that leadership change does not necessarily lead to policy change (unless something drastic happens in legislature).

For example: In Finland, the current PM (Sanna Marin of Social Democratic Party) took over after their leader resigned due to mismanagement. She becomes the PM because her party remains the largest party in parliament, and upon assuming office she basically re-appoints all the ministers with minimal adjustment. In practice, she has to do it or risk coalition collapse, meaning that her personal popularity is kind of irrelevant because she is constrained by parliamentary numeric.

TLDR: Westminster system merges party mandate with personal mandate. Proportional representation decouples them, and clearly makes party mandate more powerful than the personal one. Not all parliamentary systems exhibit undesirable features of Westminster system.

Answer 3

This is a well-known flaw in parliamentary party systems.

A new leader for a government can be elected by a very small number of people, who usually represent only one part of the electorate. There is potential there to choose a leader who is highly disapproved of by the majority of the electorate. This has been true since party leaders started being elected by party members, and even before when party leaders were elected by party MPs (Members of Parliament), which meant a smaller number of electors (though at least they were electors who were themselves elected). It isn't necessary that it happens, but it is a risk.

However while an extremely unpopular leader can be elected in this way, their ability to wield power is limited by a number of factors. The main one is that parliamentary leaders require the support of the their elected party members to continue to govern. Even if a leader is elected by 51% of the party ordinary members, if a significant number of the party's MPs will not support the leader then their reign is going to be very short lived. This is especially true if they attempt to execute extremely unpopular policies.

We see this taking effect with Liz Truss. The policies she proposed were extremely unpopular with the majority of the British electorate (or were going to prove extremely unpopular once the economic effects became apparent), even if the Conservative party members specifically elected her to carry out those policies. It is very likely that her MPs told her this behind the scenes and may have threatened not to support her if she continued, and the subsequent retractions were made to forestall exactly the kind of MP rebellion that took down her predecessor.

This effect is made more powerful because MPs usually want to be re-elected, and any radical departure from the policies supported by a majority of the electorate are going to make it hard for an MP to get re-elected.

There is a related effect at play in the Canadian Conservative Party, where a large number of party members support quite radical right-wing policies that would be opposed by most of the Canadian electorate. Recent leaders have won the leadership by espousing right-wing policies during the leadership campaign, but in order to stand a chance in a general election have had to not campaign on many of those policies. This results in them being un-elected by their party after the election (if they lose).

Answer 4

No, not necessarily.

Most obviously, parliamentary systems don't necessarily have parties.

Wikipedia's entry for non-partisan democracy provides some examples -- to pick just a couple:

• 1853 to 1890, in the self-governing colony of New Zealand, Members of Parliament were not organised into any formal political parties.
• The Canadian territories of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut have nonpartisan legislatures.

I hope it's obvious enough on its face that this sort of scenario is avoided entirely by not having political parties in the first place.

Answer 5

The parliament itself should be the limiting factor

There is a flaw in your question, you concentrate most of the attention on the leader and then you just say the she will double down on hardline Conservative policies rather than noting that she "is" (by now it is a "was") going to radically change the electoral program that was presented during the general elections. Boris Johnson promises actually were not very detailed, but he never talked about spending cuts, quite the opposite.

Electing the leader is not enough, any democratic parliament has the ability to file a no confidence vote. In theory all the elected members have the duty to keep the party and the leader within the lines of the electoral program. So, I don't know about Canada, but in the UK what we are seeing is a way to bring on a higher scale the classical case of the politician reneging the electoral promises after the election. In hindsight this could be disputed since Liz Truss already announced her resignation, but her fellow MPs never complained openly about such a change away from the electoral platform, so we can say that entire party decided to ditch it.

Unfortunately in democracy there is no other mechanism to keep the politicians from reneging the electoral promises other than the possibility to vote them out at the following elections.