Europe Is Baffled by the U.S. Supreme Court

[Aristotelian]

I would put it to you that the English Parliamentary system, post-Cromwell, has been less-than-entirely-successful experiment in giving the Legislative branch the dominant power, rather than the dominant Executive that King, Fuehrer, Emperor, Kaiser, Duce, Grand Elector, First Consul, Party Chairman has generally entailed in the rest of Europe.  For England, it often led to a collapse of any cogent national foreign policy while commercial and bureaucratic interests struggled to gain the upper hand pursuing their own unrestrained agendas worldwide.  Only an essentially-uncontested control of the high seas, the valor of British arms on land and sea, and the unwarranted hubris of many of their enemies carried them through the wild swings of funding and orientation of effort produced by Parliamentary politics, and not without the occasional embarassing disaster even then.

There's much true about that, for the past.

Over the past 50 or so years there has been an increasing marginalisation of the legislature; the high levels of party discipline here mean that M.P.s vote the way that their party managers tell them to vote, and when (most) voters go to put their cross on the paper they think about whom they would like to see as Prime Minister rather than M.P. Sovereignty is technically located in Parliament, but the executive has almost complete dominance of Parliament (through a disciplined majority in the Commons and the emasculation of the Lords).

[DumbAss Tanker]

I agree with all that, but that focuses mainly on the Commons, while the somewhat odd (By our standards) institution of the Lords and their admixture in and out of executive offices and policy affairs is a curve ball that makes it very difficult to say exactly where one branch ends and another begins, further complicated by the fact that contrary to American preconceived ideas, the personal politics of the Lords are as likely to be as bizarrely leftist as anything else, a product of the rather unique English educational system I suppose. 

Party discipline has certainly made recent UK politics look a lot more like American ones, how long that will last remains to be seen because it doesn't seem to have been the general trend for that type of political organization's long-term behavior.  While third parties evaporate like a water drop in a hot frying pan in the US, they seem to have a tenacious persistence about them in countries with a Parliamentary system...In Israel, for instance, the balance of power has been held for most of its existence by tiny splinter parties in the Knesset, often with quite bizarre ideas and agendas of their own, since neither Labour nor Likud could ever muster a clean majority without getting enough of a half-dozen assorted oddball parties to sign on in a coalition with them, and constrained long afterward to the terms of their deals in order to keep the sitting government in office (In the US system of course, with its defined terms of office, junior partners in the alliances necessary to win office are frequently thrown to the wolves as soon as the election results are certified).  In Weimar Germany, the Nazis never won a clean majority, but had to engage in coalition politics and a couple of extraordinary circumstances and legal loopholes (Mainly the Emergency Laws and the lack of any prohibition on one man holding two principal offices at once) to be able to seize power when they did.

[Aristotelian]

I agree with all that, but that focuses mainly on the Commons, while the somewhat odd (By our standards) institution of the Lords and their admixture in and out of executive offices and policy affairs is a curve ball that makes it very difficult to say exactly where one branch ends and another begins, further complicated by the fact that contrary to American preconceived ideas, the personal politics of the Lords are as likely to be as bizarrely leftist as anything else, a product of the rather unique English educational system I suppose.

The Lords tend to vote more for the status quo, whether that be from the left or the right...but their impact on the overall thrust is basically negligible. They can't vote down financial bills, they can only delay other legislation by two years, and for the most part they only act to revise what the Commons votes through without thinking about its content - by convention (known as the Salisbury Doctrine) they do not oppose the principle of anything which the winning party proposed at an election.

Party discipline has certainly made recent UK politics look a lot more like American ones, how long that will last remains to be seen because it doesn't seem to have been the general trend for that type of political organization's long-term behavior.  While third parties evaporate like a water drop in a hot frying pan in the US, they seem to have a tenacious persistence about them in countries with a Parliamentary system...In Israel, for instance, the balance of power has been held for most of its existence by tiny splinter parties in the Knesset, often with quite bizarre ideas and agendas of their own, since neither Labour nor Likud could ever muster a clean majority without getting enough of a half-dozen assorted oddball parties to sign on in a coalition with them, and constrained long afterward to the terms of their deals in order to keep the sitting government in office (In the US system of course, with its defined terms of office, junior partners in the alliances necessary to win office are frequently thrown to the wolves as soon as the election results are certified).  In Weimar Germany, the Nazis never won a clean majority, but had to engage in coalition politics and a couple of extraordinary circumstances and legal loopholes (Mainly the Emergency Laws and the lack of any prohibition on one man holding two principal offices at once) to be able to seize power when they did.

The Commons is elected by simple plurality election (essentially the same system as the House of Representatives) - this is a major factor in keeping us under two dominant parties, minor parties have an enormous hurdle to pass before getting into the Commons unless they have immense geographical concentration (such as the Scottish Nationalists). Our current third party (the Liberal Democrats) is somewhat of an oddity, but captured lots of votes from self-proclaimed (always smug) centrists and from rural/suburban lefties who didn't want to go so down-market as to vote Labour; I use the perfect tense as I suspect that their vote is going to collapse at the next election due to their coalition with the Tories (their base generally despise Tories, and dealing with reality in government will always go against their smug superiority). Minor parties are almost unanimous is wanting to change the voting system to something which is either proportional representation or would lead to seats more closely aligning with parties' proportions of votes...thankfully the recent referendum on the Alternative Vote (alias instant run-off) has put that idea on the back-burner for sometime.