[Tagging] Feature Proposal - Voting - Government offices

Matthijs Melissen info at matthijsmelissen.nl
Mon Feb 15 10:48:49 UTC 2016


On 15 February 2016 at 11:41, Martin Koppenhoefer
<dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 2016-02-15 11:11 GMT+01:00 Matthijs Melissen <info at matthijsmelissen.nl>:
>>
>> Basically you are saying that the English term matches the definition
>> correctly, but that there exists a near-synonym in Germany that does
>> not match the definition. I don't think that's enough reason to change
>> the tag (or its definition).
>
>
>
> No, I say that there are 2 principal meanings / usages in English for the
> term "government", one corresponding to the German usage, and one not, and
> that this fact alone makes a different name for the tag desirable. Germany
> was just an example, and of course there is a term for all branches together
> in German (de: "Staatsgewalt"), and if I were to find a system that fitted
> particularly well for Germany, I'd insist on distinguishing "Ämter" from
> "Behörden" ;-)
>
> I guess the actual interpretation of the term "government" will heavily
> depend on how the governance is organized, so I am not surprised that in the
> UK which doesn't implement a strong separation of powers (legislative and
> executive powers are intermingled,
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_system ), the term can refer to
> both, legislation and the executive branch.

Thanks for the addition, I see what you mean now.

Anyway I don't think this will lead to significant problems in
practice, so I don't really see a need to change the proposal.

-- Matthijs



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