A race to the bottom.

[ReggaeMike]

A prime minister can decide WHEN elections are held and who runs as parliamentary representatives of his party...because the PM is also FORMALLY head of the party.

Therein lies examples of a democratic king.... US presidents can only dream of such power

Actually that is only tradition. One does not have to be head of a party to be Prime Minister (it is not written in any Westminster constitution), however what often happens especially in corrupted systems is that the heads of the various parties are given safe seats in which to run.

US Presidents don't need to dream of such power though. When their party also controls both branches of Congress then they have far more power than even a PM. After all as Gough Whitlam can attest, a Prime Minister can still be dismissed. Besides, it isn't like very many Prime Ministers have recently been able to use the power to call elections in their favour. Both Simpson-Miller and Brown decided to time the elections to give themselves a bit of time in office to hopefully swing the electorate their way and they both lost. If memory serves me rightly too a number of other governments in the Caribbean, Australia and Canada have changed hands within the past few years despite this power.

In the US in any event as I said before their party system is very different because their political culture is different. The heads of their parties are weak because the parties are themselves mosaics of different opinions held together by a few common themes (or sometimes just by a name). For instance who can recall offhand who the DNC chairman is? Or who is the head of the Republican party? And then who are the heads of the various state branches of these parties?

In the US, politicians tend to be far more independent-minded and then to top it all off most of the time (nearly 70% of the time) one party does not control the White House, Senate and House of Reps at the same time. In our culture it would probably be the opposite with one party contolling the presidency and parliament at the same time. It would probably end up more like 1940s Cuba than 1990s America.