Parliamentary Government
Parliamentary Government
Changing conceptions and institutions
Parliamentary government, or cabinet government, is the form of constitutional democracy in which executive authority emerges from, and is responsible to, legislative authority. It differs from the arrangement of independently elected executive and legislative agencies found in the United States. Developed in western Europe and particularly in Great Britain, parliamentary government provides the pattern usually assumed by democratic experiments in eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. In common usage the term “parliamentary government” is reserved for those political systems that not only are parliamentary but are based on free and competitive elections. This excludes oneparty dictatorships exercising power within a formal parliamentary structure.
The essential union of executive and legislative branches is accompanied by the constitutional principle that the legislative body, or parliament, is supreme. Usually the principal executive, the prime minister, is appointed by a monarchical or presidential head of state. The prime minister, in turn, chooses the executive heads of government departments, the most important of whom are in the prime minister’s cabinet. Both the prime minister and his cabinet, known together as the government, are ordinarily members of parliament. They hold ministerial office only as long as they have majority support in parliament. In a bicameral legislature, this requirement usually means majority support in the more popularly elected house. Occasionally a government may be made responsible to both houses. In any case, the rule of continuous legislative confidence is regularly demonstrated in the government’s submission of its program and record for parliamentary approval. A defeat for the government through an adverse legislative vote, on a plainly important issue, indicates a lack of confidence requiring the government either to resign or to attempt, by means of a general election, to secure a new parliamentary majority. A government can stay in office only temporarily without parliamentary support for its policies. Stalemate between an executive of one persuasion and a legislature of another, as occurs with the American system of separated powers, is meant to be impossible in the parliamentary system. Instability of executive authority, on the other hand, is entirely possible. The accepted way to avoid it is by the development in parliament of a strong partisan majority prepared to support a prime minister and his cabinet during the several years between parliamentary elections. The executive authority then becomes the effective policy maker.
History
More than most working governmental forms, the parliamentary system is not so much an invention as it is an evolutionary product. Its essential union of executive and legislative authority is not simply a deliberate constitutional design. It is more significantly the result of the process by which representative assemblies successfully challenged monarchs in the course of modern history. This process, it must be said, was European, although attempts have been made to transfer its result to other parts of the world. It can even be argued that the process was characteristically British rather than European, and that, therefore, parliamentary regimes in continental Europe represented institutional transfers.
The outstanding feature of the historical experience was the evolution of parliament from a monarch’s council to a supremacy of its own. Assembled originally, as early as the medieval period, to provide advice and especially to give financial support to the monarch, parliament became in modern history the means by which first an established landowning oligarchy, then a commercial class, and finally representatives of the bulk of the population secured control of the machinery of government. The development was a long one, covering three to five centuries, and it coincided with what now seems, by comparison with new nations, a most gradual change in European society. In particular, parliamentary government developed where there was a substantial historical interval of capitalist, middle-class ascendancy between the era of dominance by court and nobility and the era of mass democracy. Especially in the nineteenth century, parliament seemed to be the agency of the substantial middle class produced by commercial and industrial capitalism.
In Britain, Parliament’s supremacy over the monarch dates from 1688, when Parliament asserted its authority to determine the monarchical succession. This authority was made effective by the eighteenth-century development of a cabinet in which those who were nominally ministers of the crown became responsible in fact to Parliament. The monarch, losing control of his ministers, ceased to be the effective executive. In an increasingly rationalist and subsequently democratic age, the hereditary principle did not provide a likely basis for independent executive authority. The claims of a representative body were not successfully resisted by a monarch. Where the monarch resisted too stubbornly, he was likely to be dethroned in favor of another monarch or of a president. The latter, even if not popularly elected, might be a stronger claimant to independent executive authority, but usually his powers were cast in the mold of a constitutional monarch’s. The presidential innovation was a late one in the parliamentary system; the French only introduced the presidency after 1870. This change may make the parliamentary order less smoothly evolutionary, as indeed was the case in France, than the retention of the monarchy while its power is reduced. The parliamentary system with a president has been successful in a few nations and has been introduced in many new nations. [SeeMonarchy.]
Parliamentary government developed its more essential features in Britain before the emergence of mass democracy. The larger part of the British population did not even have the right to vote until about the last quarter of the nineteenth century, by which time parliamentary government, including the cabinet system, was well established. Elsewhere, however, the establishment of parliamentary institutions and the achievement of universal suffrage more nearly coincided. The results in such instances were not always so favorable for the stability of the governmental system as the British phasing seems to have been. The evolutionary length of British experience bears emphasis because it may not necessarily be typical of nations attempting to practice parliamentary government. This raises the important general question whether parliamentary government can be dissociated from conditions chiefly typical of Britain, the British-settled territories, and those smaller Continental nations which closely resemble them.
Changing conceptions and institutions
The parliamentary system has been differently conceived, not only over time but also from country to country. The view that the parliamentary body itself, rather than the cabinet, was the effective policy-making authority remained a prevailing French conception, in the form of “government by assembly,” long after it had lost meaning in the British system. By the middle of the nineteenth century, often viewed as the classical period of parliamentary government, the British cabinet had assumed a central importance. This was reflected in Bagehot’s famous appraisal (1865-1867). Still, Bagehot did not move Parliament off stage. The cabinet, although it exercised leadership, remained an agency of Parliament in the sense that the House of Commons decided whether to turn out a government after discussion of its policy. Bagehot regarded this elective function, rather than the legislative function, as the most important one that Parliament performed. In this way, Parliament remained the locus of power despite the cabinet’s admittedly crucial role in the whole system.
In the twentieth century, however, the original British model changed as the cabinet increasingly had the support of a cohesive majority and thus stayed in office from one general election to the next. The British Parliament was no longer expected to exercise its power to dismiss a government. The elective function was transferred from the Commons to the general public. Parliament remained to register the electorate’s decision as to which party’s leadership was to form the cabinet, but parliamentary debates lost the impact they had formerly had on the life of the government. Accompanying the increasingly direct relation of the cabinet to the electorate was a strengthening of the prime minister’s role. As the leader of a majority party, he has come, in effect, to be chosen as a chief executive when voters elect parliamentary representatives of his party. He bears individually a responsibility to the country. His cabinet has tended to become more a changing team of ministers carrying out the leader’s program than a genuinely collegial policy-making body. The effect of this tendency, along with that which has made the government more directly responsible to the electorate than to Parliament, has been to give the British system an appearance that is less parliamentary and more presidential. It might even seem more presidential than the American system, since the prime minister is less restrained by a parliament, in which his party has a cohesive majority, than is a president of the United States by the Congress. On the other hand, the prime minister’s cohesive majority, ordinarily so supportive, may decide to displace him in admittedly rare but important circumstances. Moreover, conceiving of the parliamentary system in near-presidential terms is also somewhat hazardous in that a cohesive majority party may not always exist as it has in Britain during the middle years of the twentieth century [seeMajority rule].
Yet the tendencies that have changed parliamentary government in Britain are observable elsewhere, and usually in association with a strong parliamentary party possessing a majority or a near-majority of seats. An important case in point is the working of the West German system after World War ii. Here the chancellor, as a German counterpart of the British prime minister, established an ascendancy based on his party leadership and his popularity with the electorate. Most other Continental nations in the parliamentary mold have not developed strong executive leadership to the same degree as West Germany; in the Fourth French Republic, parliamentary government broke down in the absence of a stable cabinet system. The smaller European nations have also been successful in strengthening their cabinets while retaining the parliamentary system. The Englishspeaking nations of the overseas Commonwealth even more closely resemble the British pattern.
Cohesion and party government
Political parties have not always provided a popular base for executive leadership. Earlier they were simply groups of representatives tending loosely to support ministers or potential ministers. Although they began to have followings in the electorate before mass enfranchisement, modern, large-scale organization of political parties dates only from the last decades of the nineteenth century. So does the crucial cohesiveness of the parliamentary party in support of its leadership. Such support represents a commitment to the electorate, and this commitment makes it possible for parliamentary government to be effective party government.
The vital party is the one in parliament, rather than the extraparliamentary, mass-membership organization. The latter may be divided in its support of a leadership and its policy, but as long as the parliamentary party is able to unite, it serves as the base of stable executive authority. The parliamentary party may be influenced by the external organization and its apparatus, but decisions are made by the publicly elected members of the parliamentary party, who ordinarily support their leadership. This is a residual aspect of parliamentary supremacy, transferred from its operation in the body as a whole to operation within a party. As such, it has been strong enough in Britain and in other parliamentary nations to resist the pressures, especially of social-democratic political movements, to make parliamentary parties into agents of an outside, dues-paying, activist membership. Members of parliament feel responsible to their party’s broader electorate, not just to active party workers. This is consistent with the willing acceptance by parliamentary members of the policy positions of their leaders, who also regard themselves as directly responsible to the broader electorate.
Coalition and competition
Party cohesion alone is not the key to the achievement of executive stability in the parliamentary system. Equally important is the presence of a party, or perhaps a combination of parties, commanding a majority in the legislative body. The simplest case, barring the noncompetitive one-party arrangement, is the two-party competition that largely characterizes British parliamentary politics. Given only two major parties, the probability is high that one party will have a parliamentary majority, even a comfortable working majority. This regularly happened in Britain during the three decades following 1931. Minor parties, as opposed to a third party or other substantial parties in a multiparty system, do not ordinarily win enough seats to reduce one of the large parties to only plurality strength. Even a third party, or any number of other competing parties, would not necessarily prevent one party from gaining a majority. The Christian Democratic parties of Germany and Italy secured narrow and fairly brief majorities in such multiparty circumstances during the post-World War n years. However, absent from these unusual successes was the other ingredient of the British model of party government: a single opposition party large enough to be a potential majority and so an alternative governing party, to the point of providing a leadership core of potential ministers called the “shadow cabinet”
Despite the practical success of the two-party model, it is not necessarily an essential feature of the parliamentary system. The British themselves had a three-party system, often without a majority party, as recently as the 1920s, and they may have it again. Moreover, there are other nations that have almost consistently had more than two important parties and yet maintained parliamentary government. The leading examples, it is true, are the Scandinavian countries and a few Englishspeaking nations. Their particular multiparty systems have often produced a majority or near-majority party and have seldom been as fragmented as the French system, which provides the main instance of the difficulty of maintaining parliamentary government in a multiparty system.
Without a majority party, various means are used to try to secure majority legislative support, as required by parliamentary government. A large, but not always the largest, plurality party can form a cabinet of its own members while seeking the votes of another party (or of other parties) so as to produce a working majority. This was British practice in the 1920s. Elsewhere, it has been usual to form a cabinet that is itself a coalition representing enough parties for a parliamentary majority. Such a coalition might be headed by a prime minister acting as a leader either of the largest single party or of a smaller but key center party. The task of achieving stability is likely to be facilitated if one party is fairly near a majority on its own and can therefore manage with one or two minor coalition partners. A broader coalition is also feasible, but if it includes all or most of the large parties, the effect is to eliminate the possibility of an opposition presenting itself as an alternative government. The very broad coalition, therefore, has usually been regarded as suited only to wartime or other special circumstances, when it is deemed appropriate in two-party as well as in multiparty systems.
Special circumstances, however, can become institutionalized, as in Austria after World War n. Regularly the two major Austrian parties united in a coalition, excluding minor parties, and yet fought competitive elections against each other. In this novel arrangement, the chief function of elections was to decide which of the two parties would increase its share of cabinet positions, not to decide which of the two should form a cabinet. Elections may serve a similarly limited purpose in a more clearly multiparty nation when a coalition cabinet is established over a fairly broad political spectrum, embracing perhaps two-thirds but not all of a parliament. In this case the voters, by electing more or fewer representatives of a given party, help determine the relative strength of the several parties regularly composing the cabinet. It means a more limited form of electoral competition than that between two parties, or two groups of parties, each contending to form a government of its own. But it is competition nonetheless, and of a kind that seems relevant where clear-cut alternatives are simply not available. The result is an operation of parliamentary government different from the standard British method, but it is not incompatible with democracy.
The same cannot be said so surely for those systems in which there is one-party domination. Much depends on both the degree and the method of domination. Clearly, when one party has a legal monopoly, as in communist states, there can be no parliamentary government in the Western sense. But where party competition is legal, even if socially discouraged, the problem is more elusive. It is conceivable that a nation, soon after independence, for instance, could regard as legitimate only the party that led the national independence movement. This seems to be the case, in varying degrees, in Africa and Asia during the immediate post-imperial period. Parties other than the governing party often have too little support to furnish serious parliamentary opposition. Political competition takes place mainly within the one major party. Given freedom of expression, in and out of parliament, and given free choice of parliamentary candidates at local party levels, intraparty competition can be substantial. But when, as often happens, the leader of the single party regards open criticism as illegitimate, whether from within his party or from outside, the result tends to resemble the deliberately one-party dictatorships of communist nations.
Another kind of difficulty about the role of the opposition arises when substantial competition comes from parties that are not in fact democratic, such as communist and fascist parties. Their opposition raises the question of their legitimacy in any democratic system. This question stems from the assumption that such parties would, if in power, overturn the very parliamentary regime under which they had operated. This is exactly what the National Socialist party did to the Weimar Republic. Even without actually coming to power, a fascist or communist party can adversely affect the working of the parliamentary system by securing enough votes to become the principal opposition. The electorate then has no choice except to vote for the government, unless it is willing to support an opposition dedicated to a radical transformation of the democratic constitutional order. The French and Italian Communist parties came close to creating such limiting alternatives after World War n.
The executive and dissolution
Strengthening the cabinet and prime minister has changed parliamentary government from its nineteenth-century character, but it has not violated the basic principle of executive responsibility to parliament. On the other hand, increasing the power of the head of state, monarchical or presidential, must be understood as a step away from parliamentary government. An important and independent policymaking role for an elected president, for example, seems incompatible with the parliamentary system. The consequence of such an increase of power, as exemplified by the constitution of the Fifth French Republic and especially by the practices of President de Gaulle, is not enough to create a full-fledged presidential system but is enough to produce a hybrid parliamentary system. The counterparliamentary tendency is likely to be all the stronger when a president, equipped with constitutional authority, is popularly elected and so can claim a popular mandate to rival parliament and its chosen cabinet. Such a president ceases to be the nonpartisan, dignified head of state typified by a modern constitutional monarch or by a president chosen by parliament to play the monarch’s role [seeDelegation of powers].
Even a constitutional monarch, however, has a political function by virtue of his power to appoint the prime minister. In principle, this involves choosing a man whom a parliamentary majority would elect. And, in practice, the choice often falls automatically on the known leader of the majority party. Matters are more complicated if there is no clearly known leader of the majority party, perhaps because of a sudden death or resignation. Potentially still more complicated is the situation where there is no majority party. But even in this contingency, which regularly occurs in multiparty systems, the head of state is effectively limited in his choice by the hard fact that the prime minister, in order to remain in office, must have the support of a parliamentary majority. For the head of state to insist on his own preference, rather than parliament’s, would violate a principle of the system.
The same applies to the power of dissolving parliament. Technically, like the choice of prime minister, this is in the hands of the head of state. But for a head of state to dissolve parliament against the wishes of its prime minister and cabinet, or to refuse to dissolve when the prime minister advises him to dissolve, would interfere with the regular working of parliamentary government. Originally, as with so many other powers, dissolution was in fact the prerogative of the head of state, notably of the British monarch. But the exercises of authority over this important political matter is now the prime minister’s. In some systems, e.g., the Third French Republic, parliament retained the power to dissolve itself after a given number of years. This weakens the executive authority because the prime minister needs the power to dissolve parliament as a means of retaining the support of a majority. Members of the prime minister’s majority, in this view, will be more likely to continue voting for him if they believe that his parliamentary defeat might mean not his resignation but a new general election. Ordinary members will not want to risk their seats.
This line of argument seems applicable in a multiparty parliament, where a prime minister might effectively threaten dissolution to keep coalition members in line. But the threat in relation to one’s own party seems irrelevant in a two-party multiparty parliament, where a prime minister unquestionably has the effective power to dissolve, but he does not use it as a means to discipline his own followers. They generally have sufficient reasons to support him without the threat of dissolution. Rather, the British prime minister arranges to dissolve Parliament at a time calculated to be of maximum party advantage—for him as well as his parliamentary followers. Therefore, the least desirable occasion to dissolve would be just after a desertion by parliamentary members of his party. Going to the country with a divided party would only be to the advantage of the opposition. In summary, the power of dissolution strengthens a prime minister’s position, as it is meant to do in a parliamentary system; but with a highly developed party structure, like Britain’s, it is used primarily to time a general election for party advantage and not for retaliation against a loss of parliamentary confidence.
Individual members and the legislative function
Given the tendency of the parliamentary system, in its British form, to develop strong executive authority based on a cohesive party majority, it follows that the legislature is not a policy-making body in the manner of the U.S. Congress—more or less coequal with the executive. Individual nonministerial members of the House of Commons, for example, do not directly legislate, as do American congressmen when deciding whether to accept governmental proposals or to substitute proposals of their own. Members of the British Parliament may, especially in private party councils, influence what their leadership presents by way of policy, and they certainly question ministers (in a daily question hour) about policy particulars, in addition to debating policy generally. But they do not make policy as members of a coordinate branch of government; they lack the legislative facilities to do so. British parliamentary committees are not independent loci of power providing nonministerial members with opportunities to overturn the government’s program. In this respect the British situation is extreme, since the House of Commons avoids official subject-matter committees altogether. Other parliamentary governments, even if otherwise in the British mold, do not usually go this far in guarding against a challenge to the theoretical supremacy of the whole house or to the practical supremacy of the government, whose authority rests on the confidence of a majority in the whole house. Nevertheless, wherever parliamentary government has developed a strong and stable executive, there is necessarily an important limitation on the exercise of independent policy making by the nonministerial membership. This means that parliament’s public importance rests heavily on its public debates, but those may now fail to secure as much attention as is given party leaders on radio and television.
Only where parliamentary government has not developed strong executive leadership do legislative activity and organization resemble the American congressional pattern. The extreme examples are provided by the Third and Fourth French republics, both of which had effective subject-matter committees whose leaders could substitute their policies for the government’s. These committee leaders were often rivals of governmental leaders, who could be driven from office by adverse committee action and subsequent adverse parliamentary action. Responsibility, in this situation, is not firmly fixed in the cabinet, which usually has no stable majority in the legislature. Even on foreign policy questions, where greater executive authority has been usual in all systems, the French style of parliamentary government imposed limits on cabinet leadership. The absence of a coherent parliamentary majority, which enabled French representatives to play more active and more direct roles, is closely associated with the instability of governments in the Third and Fourth French republics.
Research and evaluation
Parliamentary government, notably its British form, has long been carefully studied by historical and legal scholars. There are standard treatises describing the laws and customs—the constitution—of the British Parliament. Not all of the historical and legal work has been by Englishmen, but it has generally expressed admiration for British institutions. This was true of earlier Continental scholars, who hoped that their nations would emulate the British system, and it was true also of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American scholars, who saw much in the British system worth adapting to the United States. For instance, Woodrow Wilson admired the British system, in Walter Bagehot’s classic description, as superior to the American presidential-congressional system. Bagehot, it should be noted, was not a conventional historical or legal scholar but a most insightful journalist. Of a different order is the standard twentieth-century analysis by Sir Ivor Jennings. In his volumes Parliament (1939) and Cabinet Government (1936), Jennings uses a wealth of historical material to illustrate the operating constitutional principles. He presents these principles as greatly modified by democratic usages since Bagehot’s time.
Since World War n there has been considerable new research in the less formal elements of parliamentary government. The research, it is true, has not been aimed directly at understanding parliamentary government as opposed to another form of government; but any effort to learn more generally about legislative and executive behavior has added to the knowledge of parliamentary institutions. The new literature involves roll-call analysis, systematic accounts of backgrounds of legislators, effects of external party organizations, intraparty and intracabinet decision making, and the participation by interest groups in the parliamentary process. The last of these subjects was hardly studied at all in most parliamentary democracies before the 1950s; indeed, until then interest groups, or pressure groups, tended to be regarded as only American political phenomena. Consequently, there was a significant gap in knowledge of even the otherwise much-studied British system.
More can be learned by detailed studies of particular elements in the established systems. But there is also a special need to understand, in comparative perspective, the common factors associated with stability and effectiveness of parliamentary government or with failure of such government. Western Europe and the English-speaking Commonwealth nations provide the main laboratories, since their historical experience with parliamentary institutions is long and varied. From this experience, there is some hope of developing hypotheses of more general applicability with respect to parliamentary government in developing nations. For such hypotheses to have validity, however, they must also be examined in the environment of the developing nations themselves. This lies in the future, since so far there has been an understandable scholarly tendency to regard the new constitutional arrangements of developing nations as less durable and so less meaningful than the broader problems of nation-building and informal group processes.
The evidence is not yet conclusive as to the adaptability of parliamentary government outside of its limited Western homelands. What is known, however, gives little cause for optimism, since no developing nation with a non-Western background has a long period of experience with parliamentary government. The record of parliamentary government is somewhat discouraging even in the advanced nations of western Europe. None of the three major Continental nations—France, Germany, and Italy—consistently maintained a parliamentary system through the first six decades of this century.
Yet the parliamentary system provided the pattern for most new twentieth-century democratic governments. This held for the embryonic political institutions of the supranational European community and for the initial stages, at least, of constitutions in many non-Western nations. The new African and Asian nations emerging from British control generally adopted parliamentary constitutions without monarchs. So did several nations that had been under the rule of other imperial powers. Japan, the most developed of non-Western nations, also established a parliamentary system.
Whether many of these nations, especially the new ones, would be able to remain for long within the rules of parliamentary government was uncertain despite the impressive scale of the Indian effort. French-speaking African nations, for example, just as they were becoming independent, tended to move away from the parliamentary form when France itself did so in changing from the Fourth Republic to the Fifth Republic.
Maintaining a strong and effective executive, yet one responsible to a legislative body, has proved difficult, if not impossible, even in many European circumstances. And without such an executive—that is, without parliamentary government that is also cabinet government—the system seems unable to cope with all of the domestic and foreign problems of a state in the modern world.
Leon D. Epstein
[See alsoConstitutions and constitutionalism; Government; Local government; Monarchy; Parties, political. Other relevant material may be found inCoalitions; Democracy; Legislation; Presidential government; and the biographies ofBagehot; Bentham; Burke; Dicey.]
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