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A lot of Western democracies are parliamentary, which eliminates the need for a powerful Supreme Court like in the US since there shouldn't be any fighting between the executive and the legislature.
The US also practices common law instead of civil law, again giving more power to judges as common law relies a lot more on precedent and interpreting the law.
Shocking, one of the few democracies that empowers its judges to the level of the US is Iran.
What's the difference between common and civil law? Never heard that
As a very rough description, civil law is a legal structure where the written legal codes take complete supremacy over any case law. Legal precedent has little value and, in many cases, can't be used as part of a legal argument. Judges have relatively little power in the interpretation of the law.
Common law, in contrast, is based on a series of previous legal decisions which can end up having the same affect as law. Previous rulings can carry the same weight as law, especially when laws are vague and need clarification.
Most of the countries that follow common law today were remnants of the British Empire. While civil law in its modern form came from Napoleonic France and its codification of Roman Law into the Napoleonic Code, other countries continued the practice and modified the code based on internal practices.
The only other major legal system in the world is Islamic law, which is its own thing.
While the USA is a relatively young country, it's oddly one of the oldest democracies.
I believe most other democracies have better-written laws and better checks and balances because, in part, of mistakes the founders made when writing the US constitution (which was always a highly imperfect compromise, allowed for slavery, and had to be ammended several times just to patch it up).
Hopefully someone more knowledgeable will chime in. But I think the shitshow we call the SCOTUS is somewhat unique.
one of the oldest democracies.
The Greek cities want to have a word with you.
They are covered by the "one of" part of the sentence. And the current Greek democratic system is not old in the sense that the US system is old.
Greek democracy has also been far from continuous, if we want to take that into account.
far from continuous
lasted longer than the whole Usa LOL
Which is why I said "one of". Keep calm and pedant on.
Well they wrote that yesterday, on one of the oldest days.
much less than the US supreme court, which allows for corruption and has lifetime appointments.
It's easy to think about the US supreme Court versus other high courts the same way that the US treats voting districts.
In almost every country with a similar voting system, gerrymandering, dividing up districts arbitrarily, is illegal because you can easily say well. I'm going to divide it like this so that only these people's votes count and I'll just ignore the voters that I don't like.
That is illegal in most western countries.
Gerrymandering is perfectly legal in the US, resulting in a far weaker vote because entire counties can be disregarded by dividing the county up cleverly to benefit the Republicans, who take far greater advantage of this.
Same with the court systems, the US didn't set up protections and hasn't modifed or improved the court as time has gone on and problems have arisen like direct bribery or contradicting rulings or politically refusing justice appointments.
From what I can tell, gerrymandering only works due to the whole first past the post voting system you have for districts.
In a fair system where every vote is counted all the way up the chain, ditrict shapes and sizes doesn't matter.
Getting rid of FPTP would also finally make new parties a realistic thing.
gerrymandering only works due to the whole first past the post voting system you have for districts.
In addition, the commission who draws up the electoral districts in the US are not independent, but appointed by whichever party is ruling in a given state. John Oliver covered the topic.
I don't understand that since gerrymandering allows you to manipulate the results of the voting itself by diminishing the significance of the votes themselves.
Can you explain more how gerrymandering only works with fptp?
FPTP means that if candidate A gets a majority of the votes in a district they get to represent the district as a whole, meaning that effectively all votes for candidante B, C, D, and E are thrown away.
This means that there is a point to gerrymander districts so they will allways have the majority.
If I understand the voting system in the US correctly, votes are counted in the disctricts, districts are then counted further up.
In a fair voting system, districts does not matter for anything but statistics.
Your understanding of fptp and the US district voting system is correct, but I'm still not sure how any different voting system solves dividing districts into specific voting blocks.
I guess it would make a small but significant difference over time, but as long as gerrymandering is legal within the US framework, it's still very easy to manipulate the results by district, ranked choice voting or not.
It's s kind of like the structural problem of the electoral college. You can change the rules within the electoral college, but as long as you have those 200 people standing between the popular vote and the presidency, Donald Trump can get elected despite people not wanting him to be president.
How vulnerable
More than you would think.
While the most systems are built more robust than the Us one, it is still a sad fact that fascism / totalitarism is on the rise in many countries currently. Even robust systems are vulnerable.
Italy has been in the hands of one man recently who owned all the press and the better part of the state, and he transformed it into a puppet show. He is gone but the country is still suffering.
Austria was on the brink only a few years ago. One man had nearly owned the 3 powers legislature, executive and judiciary. Only a strong scandal in the press has saved the country.
Here in Greece the supreme court is determining goverment actions as unconstitutional, recommending changes, and nothing is being done. It is essentially powerless.
Other places haven’t come anywhere near the politicisation that the US has. Instead, appointments are treated as pretty meritocratic.
I’ve personally spoken to a former chief justice of a country about the selection process, and they said unequivocally that it should be taken away from the government. It should instead be done by an intermediate selection committee whose members are selected by the government. Basically creating a degree of separation between the government and the court to buffer against politicking the whole thing.
Makes perfect sense to me and is probably the best chance the US has apart from packing the court.
Otherwise, without knowing much about the US situation, it seems to be in part attributable to the polarisation of the strict two party system, the central quasi-monarchical presidency and the vagueness and ~~hear~~heat of the bill of rights. Lots of places just don’t have that combination of factors … where in same ways the US system is likely showing its age and lack of evolution over time.
In fact, generally, it might be true to say that US politics over the past 10 years and into the next century will be driven by the friction between needing to adapt to its new state in the world (less super power and more dependent on global affairs) and wanting to cling to its traditional role and the old promises of the post-war era.
In the case of Germany: a lot less, but it's not impossible.
The German equivalent to the supreme court is the Bundesverfassungsgerichtshof (BVerG, federal Constitutional Court) and in stark contrast to the highest American court, it is not an appeals court. A lower court might refer a case to the BVerG, or ask it to clarify a constitutional question, that has come up during a trial but most case don't even have a theoretical path to Karlsruhe. Political parties and NGOs may also go to directly in front of the Constitutional Court to protest the constitutionality of laws.
New justices are confirmed with a 2/3 majority which means that you need to convince roughly 30% of the opposition to vote for your candidate. That in turn leads to more moderate candidates put forward. Justices are also limited to one term of twelve years. Outside of that a justice may be removed from office by the German federal president* if 2/3 of BVerG justices vote to impeach their colleague.
So far so good. Unfortunately there are some weaknesses in the entire setup. The law responsible for needing a 2/3 majority to elect a justice can be changed with a simple majority. A right wing government could also expand the court by introducing a third senate and pack it with their appointees. But that requires them to get into power first.
German late night show Die Anstalt did a segment about that problem a while back: https://youtu.be/ljjZ6AZsmGk (Video in German)
Tldr: the highest German court is not going to stop a fascist government from doing fascism but it is also not working to put the fascists into power, the way the US supreme court is.
Update: Yesterday the German government introduced a constitutional amendment that would protect the Constitutional Court from some of this. It's not perfect but it is still pretty good and it has the necessary 2/3 majority to pass
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-moves-to-protect-top-court-against-far-right/a-68403671
All of them.
It can happen here. It’s frighteningly easy to get to this point.
Different countries have a variety of very different approaches to appointing judges, and some of those methods are not nearly as easy to corrupt as the American system.
Americans are subject to a lot of cultural indoctrination about how their system is the "greatest democracy in the world," "leader of the free world," and other such platitudes. It's really not the case, though. America's system is one of the earliest that's still around, and unfortunately that means it's got a lot of problems that have been corrected in democracies that were founded later on but have remained embedded in America's.
Doesn't help that America has a somewhat problematic electorate as well.
In the case of Colombia, there are independent investigation agencies that aren't subject to any of the three branches, and specifically the judiciary branch has a committee that investigates disciplinary trespasses by judges. Also, there are three separate "Supreme Courts": one handles typical everyday cases, another handles conflicts between citizens and the government, and another handles Constitutional violations. So there are several protections against a rogue Court.
Man, I had no idea that I would one day be deeply jealous of major aspects of the Columbian government.
And we still haven't gotten to the part where government workers, all the way up to the president, are forbidden from making any public statements in favor of candidates or campaigns.
