DarrenBarefoot.com

The Senate has fewer members (100) making each vote carry more weight. This also means that the larger number of citizens that you represent are more likely to pay attention to how you vote.

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Senate - 2 votes for every state. Rhode Island and Vermont carry the same weight as New York and California.
House - 435 representatives based upon population (New York and California have more weight than Rhode Island and Vermont).
The House controls the introduction of legislation on issues of taxation and budget (among other things). The House typically only introduces bills that are likley to pass based on party lines (or predetermined support) and therefore they do not result in extensive debate (bills pass in 1 or 2 days).
The Senate debate (lasting a week or more) is a result of a less clear majority as well as the need to respond to actions by the House.
It all goes back to the system of checks and balances. The big states (NY & CA) can not push around the little states (RI & VT) because they control the House, they still have to get Senate approval.
If both houses approve a measure, then it goes to the President.
The Judicial Branch (the final level of checks and balances) only gets involved when the others can not “play nice” with one another.

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In that sense, the American senate is not that different, at first glance from the Canadian senate. Basically, they are a second instance that ratifies the house decisions (or not).

The main difference being that the American senators are elected and not partisanly nominated until death or retirement occurs.

Also, the American senators might have more exclusive powers, but I’m not exactly sure what, so I’ll shut up now.

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In practical terms, perhaps the U.S. founders expected the political spectrum to be more diverse in both houses; presumably the time when things work most as those founders might have intended is when one party has the majority in one house, and the other party in the second. That might produce deadlock, but it’s also a fine example of “checks.”

It certainly is interesting that a system explicitly designed to provide multiple levels of consideration and diversity of opinion morphed rather rapidly into one where two parties overarching the actual political structure control it entirely without any smaller ones, while more “monopolistic” ones like Canada’s — essentially a single branch of government with hangers-on — has multiple parties involved.

And then there are all those even more hodgepodge systems like Israel’s, where majorities are rare and multi-party coalitions and alliances the norm.

Is there a political axiom that all such systems tend to evolve so that the heads of government have roughly the same amount of control, by either widening or narrowing the number of parties that have viable chances of election? I have no poli sci training, so maybe that’s an obvious idea, but I haven’t heard of it.

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I think this is roughly how ours works: in Canada we follow the British model to a large degree. Members of parliament are elected one per riding (constituency) in a first-past-the-post system, and their riding boundaries are drawn by non-partisan bureaucrats based on Census numbers, trying to maintain roughly (sometimes very roughly) similar numbers of people per riding. Urban ridings can be tiny; rural ridings such as those in the North can encompass significant fractions of the entire area of the surface of the Earth.

The prime minister is the leader of the party with the most seats in the parliamentary House of Commons, but must also be an MP elected to one of those seats, and appoints a cabinet from (almost always but not exclusively) among MPs of the same party.

Instead of a House of Lords, we have a Senate whose members are appointed for what used to be lifetime but are now age-limited terms (I think the age is 75?) by the prime minister, so it is made up largely of a mix of patronage cronies of the past several prime ministers. Their numbers are based on a combination of population, provincial representation, and historical anomaly, but they represent only their provinces, not specific towns or ridings.

The titular head of state, the Governor General, is appointed by the Queen of England as recommended (i.e. decided) by the prime minister, and can in extreme circumstances dissolve Parliament and force an election. Supreme Court judges are also appointed directly by the PM, as far as I understand it.

In other words, the prime minister and the ruling party have remarkable power when they have a parliamentary majority, although the Supreme Court is more independent than it would seem, and there are traditions of widespread consultation around many things that the PM could theoretically decide solo.

PMs can resign or be forced out by their own parties, in which case the party chooses a new leader and things continue on with that person as the new prime minister — no new election. Elections do not occur on a regular schedule but at the whim of the government, with a maximum term of about five years.

And that’s our federal system in a nutshell.

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The Australian system, for anyone interested, is roughly halfway between the Canadian and US systems. Everthing #9 said about Canada goes for Australia too, except that our Senators are elected by the people on rolling terms like in the US. Our Senate is (like the US) also intended to represent the Australian states, so that you get the same arguments over small states (eg Tasmania) having the same say in the Senate as big States (NSW or Queensland).

The Australian Senate tends to spend longer debating Bills than the House, and often runs committees of inquiry into particular Bills or reform proposals. Senators would have traditionally voted on State interests, but my impression is that it’s largely party interests today.

Our head of state is also a Governor-General like Canada, appointed by the Queen (who’s technically the Queen of Australia from our point of view, just as she’s the Queen of Canada from your point of view - even if she also happens to be the Queen of England). We don’t have quite the same “progressive” approach to appointing G-Gs here though - no Asian or black women, just old white men.

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George, I don’t want to get into a meta-discussion, but at least some of us tried. Let me try again.

Darren’s links explain all of the major differences, I tried to add a bit of historical perspective, and others have given int’l comparison. Yet it is true that the question “what is the practical difference” remains. I would say that beyond all those documented differences, there is none. The US constitution is just set up so that, in the basic case, laws are agreed to by the majority of two large committees and one extra person (the president). I’m sure insiders will tell you that how all that power is exercised (how they are lobbied and how they respond, how they handle elections, etc.) is vastly different between the two, but I think it just boils down to being a built-in redundancy.

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Wow, I learned a lot from you guys. Hi, I am an aspiring Politician and I was very interested in all of your knowledge. Keep up the good work!

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House- The House tends to be more more centralized, more formal and has a stronger leadership.
Rules committee fairly powerful in controlling time and rules of debate (in conjunction with the majority leader). More impersonal. Power less evenly distributed. Members are highly specialized. Emphasizes tax and revenue policy. Seniority important in deteremining power.
Senate­- The Senate tends to be less centralized, less formal and has a weaker leadership.
No rules committee; limited on debate come through unanimous consent or cloture of filibuster. More personal. Power is more evenly distributed. Members are generalists. Emphasizes foreign policy. Seniority less important in determining power.

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I think the question is very essential and I think it is worth getting a lawyer to explain in deed the practical differences between these two bodies.

What exactly does the senate delibraterate upon as different from that of the House of reps?

what are the lines of divide in their respective responsibilities to the public?

Well, from all the comments posted so far, I think the senate acts as a check to the powers of the executive arm of government whilst the house of reps basically deals with issues of public interests like probes as they affect the citizen.

I think this still needs some clearing out.
Thanks.

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