Australian bicameralism as semi-parliamentarism: patterns of majority formation in 29 democracies

Abstract

The article analyses the type of bicameralism we find in Australia as a distinct executive-legislative system -a hybrid between parliamentary and presidential government -which we call 'semiparliamentary government'. We argue that this hybrid presents an important and underappreciated alternative to pure parliamentary government as well as presidential forms of the power-separation, and that it can achieve a certain balance between competing models or visions of democracy. We specify theoretically how the semi-parliamentary separation of powers contributes to the balancing of democratic visions and propose a conceptual framework for comparing democratic visions. We use this framework to locate the Australian Commonwealth, all Australian states and 22 advanced democratic nation-states on a twodimensional empirical map of democratic patterns for the period from

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