Image talk:Form of government parliamentary.png

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[edit] Finland

Very nice map, but Finland ought to be in orange (elected President but Parliamentary system). Tamino 08:36, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

While the Finnish president is in most matters pretty similar in authority to various elected ceremonial presidents (Ireland, Portugal, Austria and so on), my understanding of the Finnish constitution is that it's very closely based on the French Fifth Republic and that she is still a somewhat active political rather than a purely ceremonial figure. That's what gets it listed under Semi-presidential system (not my doing) here at Wikipedia, and why I stuck with disqualifying it from "pure" parliamentarism. The Tom 02:01, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

It's true that the Finnish President has more than ceremonial powers (essentially the President conducts foreign policy in cooperation with the Government), but the Constitution of 2000 greatly reduced the President's powers from what they were before. Evidently some wires have got crossed if Finland is listed under Semi-presidential system, because it is listed as a Parliamentary system in that article. Perhaps there should be a note to that effect in the Parliamentary system article, and/or someone could define how ceremonial a President has to be in a Parliamentary system. Tamino 07:12, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Let me just add that it's really retarded; nominally, the Austrian president has *more* power than the French one, he just chooses (by tradition) never to use it... So what do we go with? The nominal semi-presidential system, or the factual parliamentary one? And where do we draw the line? —Nightstallion (?) 09:22, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, unwritten convention can certainly be as powerful or more powerful than any written component of a constitution. I think most people agree on that point. The problem for any encyclopedia is that it's a lot harder to verifiably say what unwritten conventions are and then cite them unambiguously. This gives written law an unfortunate leg-up over convention when it comes to Wikipedia, something that I think we should endeavour to counteract.

If we were to take a 100% letter-of-the-law view of classifying states by government, then there'd be a lot of orange states turned yellow (Ireland, Austria and a few others), and a quite a few red states turned pink—for example, the British monarch could quite legally become an active executive player in the affairs of the UK or Canada tomorrow if she wanted to (even in the latter case through a violation of the Statute of Westminster, which is after all, in legal terms, an expression of the crown's whim). But we know such behaviour is safeguarded by convention and would certainly prompt a constitutional crisis. So obviously we can't assign colours to states based purely on written constitutional law and expect a map at the end of the exercise that in any way corresponds to the way things actually work. By factoring in unwritten law you get much closer, the only question is figuring out what the extent of those unwritten rules are and whether, for instance, they justify shifting Finland into orange akin to Austria.

Anyway, a worthwile debate to have—perhaps if we wish to continue it it might be worth moving to one of the article talk pages? I'd rather have the article clarified first and the image follow on from it rather than vice versa. The Tom 05:27, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

This discussion has been copied to Talk:Parliamentary system#Finland. Please feel free to continus the discussion there. Tamino 07:36, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Green States

The map displays only the red and orange parliamentary monarchies and republics, but the form of government map also has several green states that would, in my opinion, also count as parliamentary and not as presidential.Paj.meister 16:50, 28 November 2006 (UTC)