Lesson video

Hello everyone, and welcome back to citizenship.

My name is Mrs. Shortland, and I look forward to taking you through this full session all about how others govern.

Welcome back, so this is our main question for today.

What are the key differences between the Westminster Parliament and the U.

S.

Congress? But, as ever before we start, just pause the video and make sure that you have somewhere quiet to study you have a pen and some paper to take some notes and when you're ready, please join me.

Welcome back, so here's the plan for today.

We should be able to answer all of these questions at the end of the lesson.

So what is a political system? What are the key differences between the U.

K.

and the U.

S.

political systems? And what are the key difference between the U.

K.

and the U.

S.

executives and legislatures? Both the U.

K.

and the U.

S.

have three branches of government, the legislative branch and this is the lawmaking branch, the executive they put all the laws into effect, and the judiciary which administers and interprets the law, but we wouldn't be having a look at that branch today.

But we will be looking at both parliament and Congress because they're the legislative branch of government and today we're going to explore these institutions in a bit more detail.

Before we start let's just recap an important idea, a political system, and this just refers to the things or processes that work together to enable politics to work and political decisions to be taken.

So a political system like any system relies on many different parts to keep it going.

Let's think for example, about a railway system what does that need? Yeah, track, routes, trains, drivers, and customers.

And if one of these elements fails there would be a problem.

So in any political system there are many elements such as people eligible to vote, a voting system, political parties, MPs, the government, parliament, and so on.

If we included everyone in a political system of the U.

K.

it would be an extremely long list but I think you get the idea.

So that's one part it needs people and things to make it work.

Another part of a political system is to think about the classifications of such, such as monarchy and democracy.

They can be classified in many different ways and we've already looked at the idea of semi democracies, authoritarian, dictatorship, and other types of political systems in lesson one if you remember.

And around the world there's many different ways a country can be governed.

For example, as you see on your screen government by one person such as the monarchy or government by the many, and this is known as a democracy.

Democracy is although have similar features like freedoms and the rule of law can be run differently.

But today we're going to look at two different types of democratic systems of government, presidential as in the U.

S.

and parliamentarian, as in the U.

K.

Finally, when we thinking about political systems we can say that there are many functions.

So one function of a political system is to determine and enforce the laws of a country.

Another function is to provide stability, leadership, maintain order, provide public services for its people or national security.

Have a go at this question hopefully not too difficult.

There is only one type of political system is that true or false? I'll give you to the count of three, one, two, three and it is false.

I'll put the definition up again for you if you didn't get that down before.

There are many different types of political systems that's the answer.

So just pause the video if you need to take down that definition.

Okay, now we're on to our very first task.

What's splash, quite simply I want you to have a think about both of the countries and how they're governed and number one write down any words that you associate with the U.

K.

political system.

Number two, write down all the words that you associate with the U.

S.

political systems, you making two lists of different types of words.

And number three, if you can challenge yourself by explaining the words that would be great.

I give you a few minutes to do that, So pause the video and rejoin me when you're ready.

How did you do? We may have included some of the words that you can see and if you want to write down any that you missed then please feel free to do so while I'm talking.

What's interesting to note is that one similarity between both countries is that they're broadly considered a two party system.

U.

K.

has many political parties some of which are represented in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, however, conservative Labour Party consistently get the biggest share of votes.

And in a similar vein Republicans and Democrats don't dominate the U.

S.

politics.

Let's just think about how the U.

S.

and U.

K.

systems work.

and here there are some similarities too.

They both use a bicameral political system.

They have two houses which make up the legislative branch of government this means that there are two houses which help make and pass laws.

And bicameral is just a Latin word and literally means two chambers.

A bicameral parliament or Congress is one that contains two separate assemblies who must both be agree when new laws are made.

So I'm sure you know that the two houses in the U.

K.

are the House of Commons and the House of Lords and the U.

S.

has the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Now, when a country is supported bicameral legislature, there's lots of advantages but also disadvantages to this.

For an advantage it means there are different perspectives and ideas that can be heard.

So it sort of provides a system of checks and balances for the government.

There's always another body of people to scrutinise a law that's being passed.

However, just as that is an advantage there are also problems with this system.

For example, it can lead to an action if houses disagree and this in turn could lead to a delay in laws being passed.

The equivalent of the House of Commons in the U.

S.

is the House of Representatives.

So let's look more closely at both of these lower chambers within parliament and Congress.

Have look at the pictures, what do you notice? I'd like you to pause the video to get a good look, write down everything that you can see and then rejoin me when you're ready.

Welcome back, so probably the first thing you notice is how the seats are arranged.

The House of Commons appears much more old fashioned, doesn't it? and the seats look more like choir stores.

The government and opposition party to face each other on opposing sets of benches.

This layout seems much more adversarial and confrontational in a way.

In the House of Representatives on the left the seating is arranged in a semicircle and this is designed to encourage consensus among political parties.

Many parliaments choose a semi or hemicycle design.

For example, if you have a look at the Scottish parliament and the European parliament here are two examples that have a very similar design.

Also, did you notice that the front of both rooms you can see people sitting and facing the representatives and MPs? The most significant person sat at the front in both the House of Representatives and the Commons is the speaker of the house.

Although this position differs slightly, both speakers preside a debate and keep order.

In the U.

K.

the speaker sits in a chair at the front of the House and traditionally members supporting the government sit on his or her right, and supporting the opposition on his or her left.

Okay, you are now becoming such experts on parliament and congress, so let's check to see what you could add to this table.

Task two, you ready? I'd like you to make a copy of this table and see if you could fill in any details from what you've learned so far.

So pause the video, see what you can fill in and then come back to the lesson when you're ready.

Welcome back.

Well, I think you probably need a bit more information to complete your tables.

So what I'd like you to do to help you with task two is to watch two videos and use them to fill in your remaining boxes.

Now you can find the links to the video on the worksheet, so you'll need to come out of this one and go into the worksheet and then click next activity to access everything.

When you finished watching them, come back to the lesson, the videos or notes should only take about 15 to 20 minutes I'll see you back in a bit.

I hope you enjoyed those videos, spend some time now completing a table if you've not already finished it, just press pause and resume when you're ready.

So here's a sort of completed table and I'm sure your table is much more detailed than this one but I've just put down, some very basic facts that I hope you've gathered.

If you didn't get all of those responses feel free to add in some to your own table.

Let just read some of them out briefly because I think you've learnt probably a lot more from the clips.

If we take the House of Commons and the House of Representatives have a look, they both do similar things make laws and represent people.

They both get elected, the difference really is in the amount of people that work there.

650 MPs, one per constituency as opposed to 435 people the number of representatives in the House of Representatives depends on the size of the state.

How long do they serve? Five years and two years for the House of Representatives.

So some clear similarities and also some differences that the videos would have taken you through.

So far, we've been discussing the legislative branch of running a country in a session.

In the U.

S.

the executive branch which is the office of the presidency is elected separately to the legislature.

In the U.

K.

the executive, the government, which consists of the prime minister and the cabinet is found within the legislature and is not elected separately.

So to summarise in the U.

S.

the executive branch presidents and cabinet cannot also be members of the legislator, nor can they be members of the judicial branch but to new U.

K.

all these functions are interdependent.

The prime minister and cabinet have to be members of either the House of Commons or the House of Lords.

And as just a reminder at the bottom of your screen there, remember from our previous sessions, a prime minister is the person who's leading the political party with the most seats at the time of the election, they automatically become the PM.

This is different to the U.

S.

as the presidential candidates are nominated at both the Republican and Democrat national conventions and the different nominees then fight it out in the presidential primaries to see who's going to represent the parties in the actual presidential election.

So your final-ish task, you've really worked well today.

What I'd like you to do is write a paragraph explaining the key differences or similarities between a U.

K.

parliament and the U.

S.

Congress.

So in your opinion, how similar do you think they are? Look back at your table, your notes, you might want to replay the video and try to think about how the two different systems make decisions, governor country, and represent the people.

Pause the video now, have a go at that paragraph and I will see you back in a bit.

How did you do, you could have included both U.

S.

houses are elected, the U.

K.

has one elected and one appointed house.

In U.

K.

the executive are also members of parliament in the U.

S.

the executive sit outside Congress.

U.

K.

houses are much bigger than in the U.

S.

despite having a smaller population.

There's lots of information that you could have used there so don't worry if you haven't got the same sort of ideas that I've written here.

there's many things that you could say.

That's it well done for your participation today and look at everything we covered.

We started off right at the start looking at political systems, different functions, and different classifications.

You moved down to what the key differences were between U.

K.

and U.

S.

political systems and then finally looking at the differences between executives and legislatures.

You've done really well, I hope you can answer all of those questions so give yourself a tick.

And as always, just some final words, it would be great if you could share your work with OAK National if you'd like to just ask your parent or carer and then share work if everything's okay on Twitter tagging @OAKNational and #LearnwithOak.

And finally, don't forget to complete the exit quiz and have a great rest of your day.

Thanks very much for taking part today and I hope to see you soon.

Bye.