As I envisioned this, our "Parliament" (or Senate or whatever you'd like to call it) would be expanded to have something like 15 or 20 people. This would serve to 1) Give more people a say in the government (as I assume we will be eliminating regional government), 2) Make parliamentary elections for the Prime Minister more exciting, and 3) Allow the Prime Minister to select a cabinet from within the Parliament (and the opposition to select a shadow cabinet if they so desire) without the entire Parliament being frontbenchers. Cabinet members could then each have their own portfolios, which could be something of a cross between the American legislative committee system and the parliamentary cabinet portfolio system.
The parliament would be unicameral, though if regional governments are preserved, perhaps we could have an upper house/council of Governors similar to the
German Bundesrat. This isn't really essential to the plan, however, and could be decided later. I would like to include it somehow, but my worry would be finding enough people willing to both serve in the 15 or 20 member Senate and in the maybe 5-6 member Council of Governors.
The main difference between this proposal and the universal one, is of course that not everyone is automatically made a member of the lower (or only) house of parliament, and thus not everyone gets to vote for Prime Minister. This is done for a number of reasons, but the main reason is to preserve the purpose of the game as election simulation, which is something that we can make in depth and fun very easily, versus something like a governing simulation, which generally requires a lot more work. But, if the parliament isn't universal, and it elects the Prime Minister, then people won't have a direct say in the leader of the country (though of course they'll have an indirect say through the parties and politicians they elect to the parliament). To rectify this (and because the nationwide presidential election is usually one of the most engaging, entertaining parts of the current system), I would propose the retention of a nationally-elected President (either through our current IRV system or a two-round run-off system).
Truthfully I hadn't given much thought to how much the President would have. We can, as has already been discussed in this thread, go two ways really: a model more closely based on the German (and other countries') model, where the President is mostly a ceremonial figurehead, somewhat akin to a constitutional monarch in a country like Great Britain or the Netherlands (this would be a parliamentary republic, if you want to wikipedia that); or a model like the French system, where the President is more than a figurehead, with a division of powers between the Prime Minister and his cabinet and the President (a semi-presidential system, if you want to wikipedia that). The distinction here is really how much power is given to the President: is it a weak office that merely carries out the ceremony of the political system (appointing the Prime Minister and cabinet with the advice of the parliament, etc.) or is he given greater political clout.
If we do adopt this system and have a President (this system could technically function without one, but I think that would be less interesting) and we wanted him to be more than a mere figurehead, he could be given veto power, for instance, or the ability to propose national referenda, along with the responsibility of focusing on foreign affairs. I'd be happy to hear ideas, though, about the President in this system, or indeed any of it. Questions are also welcome.
