Difference between 'Congress' and 'Parliament'?

Generically, they are pretty much the same thing. There may be some differences in how they are selected from country to country, but they serve the same basic function.

It is the body that proposes and writes the laws of most countries.

They process proposed laws and bounce them back and forth until it has passed through or been voted down. The Congress is made up of representatives from different states numbered for the populations and thereby districts in those states. Senators numbber two per state and only two in order to ensure fairness in representation. Ideally, they balance each other. Another difference is that the VP of the U.S. is the presiding officer of the Senate.

Oops, I’m terribly sorry, I saw Parliament and read Senate.

How are they meant to be different and how they are different are two completely different questions.

They are meant to be different by their powers, scope and responsibility.

They are the same/similar in that they are irresponsible, easily manipulated charlatans.

In a Parliamentary democracy, the party with the largest number of elected representatives forms the government and the leader of that party is the national leader, the Prime Minister.

In the USA, the President is chosen, independent of the number of representatives of his party that are elected members of Congress.

What Dr. Lawrence said, but then, you have democracies that have both prime ministers and presidents, like France and India.

I’ve lived (and voted) in both systems. They do, very much, work the same way. They represent their population, create legislation and do loads of talking. The biggest difference I found was how the leadership was selected.

With the parliament system in New Zealand and Norway, there are more than just two main parties that get represented. Each party has a leader. If there is no clear majority of one party in parliament after an election, the parties try to form ‘coalitions’ to form a group that will hold the majority of the seats. This ‘coalition’ then finds someone to lead them and it can end up being from a very small minority party. Norway ended up with a Prime Minister from the Christian Party for several years and his party held a mere 15% of the county’s support.

In New Zealand, Winston Peters ended up strong arming the country into being appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer of the country after his party ended up ‘piggy in the middle’ when neither Labour nor National won a clear majority, forcing both major parties to go into negotiation with Winston Peter’s ‘New Zealand First’ party. Peter’s electorate clearly gave him a mandate to negotiate and form a government with Labour, but he went where he would have more power and did his deal with National. He ended up disgraced and was outed at a power monger in 2008.

They’re just labels, and most legislative systems have been influenced by a myriad of sources. However, the labels do loosely point to differences. British and Roman customs are broadly the two most prevalent customs, probably, but the latter definitely influenced the former. There are some tendencies to point out. Parliaments in Europe, despite the French-ish name, are likely to be distantly descended from Germanic tribal meetings that eventually evolved into more formal government institutions. Besides the UK Parliament, the most obvious example appears to the Icelandic one (Althing) – these two have a fair degree of continuity because these countries never really went through violent political restructurings the way many continental powers did. However, the Germanic legacy of tribal moots, which either evolved into or were rejected in favor of (however you prefer to look at it) parliaments in various ways, lasted well into the modern period in nearly every western European country – just as kingship did. Today, whether you have continuity going back to the Middle Ages or not, just about every example of a legislative system in the “free world” has been influenced by liberal ideas of direct democracy, equality under the law, due process, etc..

Political restructurings, even revolutions, often try to conjure older, seemingly eternal, meanings – as if there’s some legitimacy in “getting back to our roots.” In Europe, and the U.S., this often meant the popular Germanic legacies get rejected in favor of what is seen as the height of civilization: the Roman constitution, or bastardized visions thereof. The United States’ selection of a “congress” instead of a “parliament” was clearly a deliberate rejection of the Anglo-Saxon parliamentary legacy in favor of something seen as older, purer, and more romantic.* More specifically, the inclusion of a Senate upon “Capitol Hill”† was almost certainly intended to conjure up images of venerable provincial leaders civilly debating legislation. The House of Representatives is intended to be analogous to Roman legislative assemblies, which were supposed to represent the people as opposed to the aristocracy (I actually don’t know much about Roman constitution, but it’s a safe assumption that it rarely worked out that way). Despite some promising reforms, this shows you that the U.S. political system was really anything but revolutionary – it was evolutionary, but in some ways retrograde.

* Nothing new about this. Charlemagne tried to portray himself as a continuance of the Roman imperial customs. So did Napoleon, and so did Mussolini. And until Napoleon destroyed it, so did much of what is today Germany. Remember the “Holy Roman Empire” (the joke: neither holy, Roman, nor an empire)? And, then look at some other titles: the German Empire of World War I was ruled by a kaiser, and the Russian Empire was ruled by a czar. Note the similarity to the Roman “Caesar.”

† Analogous to the Capitoline Hill, where the Roman Senate met, which you can till visit today

Congress is the opposite of progress.