Essay On England Vs Germany

While democracy is present in much of the modern world, it is difficult to define exactly what democracy is due to the varying ways of governing present in the world. In this paper, I will compare England and Germany according to Lijphart’s models of majoritarian and consensus democracies. In Lijphart’s model, there are two main ideas in which these two systems differ: how easy it is for a single party to take control of the government and how much a party can change policy once they have control of the government. The first includes ideas such as party affiliations of the cabinet, executive-legislative relations, number of political parties, electoral systems, and interest group affiliation ("Constitutional Choices"). The second includes topics of federal unit setup, legislature, amenability of the constitution, judicial review, and bank independence ("Constitutional Choices"). Using these two broad ideas, the democracies of England and Germany are able to be compared. In reference to the ease with which a single party can take control of a government, one can find the English system of government to be a fairly good example. When considering the party affiliations of …show more content…
In the United Kingdom, judicial review of legislation passed by parliament is not present in most cases. The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom is not extremely strong due to the sovereignty of Parliament (Essays, 2013). The Supreme Court can, however, rule on laws that go against human rights or the European Union (Essays, 2013). In Germany, judicial review is present in that the courts can decide whether a law or act by the legislative or executive branch of government goes against the Basic Law (Rupp, 1960). Germany also has both federal and state courts that operate as part of a system (Rupp, 1960). This judicial review prevents laws from being passed that do not follow the Basic