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The Philippines’ Road Ahead, Part 2:A Unitary System or a Federal System?
Sunday, May 16, 2010 at 7:17pm
The difference between “Presidential or Parliamentary” systems, which we discussed in Part One of this exploration of ways to improve the way the Philippines is governed, and “Unitary or Federal” systems is that the former are systems of government, while the latter are systems of administration. In other words, both a presidential or parliamentary form of government can be organized as a unitary or federal system, and there are examples of all four combinations among the world’s democracies:
Presidential and Unitary:
Presidential and Federal:
Parliamentary and Unitary:
Parliamentary and Federal:
In a unitary system, the nation is constitutionally governed as single unit in a “top-down” fashion. Political power of the government might well be delegated to lower levels, as is done here in the Philippines with the country’s arrangement of regions, provinces, municipalities, and barangays, but the central government retains the ultimate authority. The particular arrangement of lower government levels, the geographic areas they cover, and their specific rights and responsibilities are not constitutionally-protected, but are defined, and can be changed by, laws made by the national legislature.
In a federal system, the lower levels of government – usually called states or provinces – have a constitutional existence, and cannot be unilaterally changed by the national government. The nation is effectively governed in a “bottom-up” fashion; whether it is explicitly stated in the nation’s constitution or not (as it is in the U.S. Constitution) the national government has rights and responsibilities delegated to it by the states or provinces, rather than the other way around as in a unitary system.
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