Stability in Parliamentary Regimes: The Italian Case

Abstract: In this article, we distinguish legislative stability from government stability and argue that the character of the relationship that exists between them is a complex one in which various combinations are possible. We focus on Italy because of the manner in which it has combined legislative stability with government instability. Our findings indicate that the relationship between legislative and government stability in Italy is best seen as curvilinear, that the analysis of government stability must take the number of governments as well as the duration of governments into account, and that the attributes of the party system that stabilize the legislature destabilize governments. Given these findings, we discuss their implications for explaining stability in parliamentary regimes in terms of events, “strong parties,” and strategic calculation. We conclude that legislative stability should not be treated simply as a secondary or derivative effect of government stability and that Italy can serve as a benchmark for further study of the nature and determinants of the relationship between the two in other parliamentary systems.     

我国人民民主面临的问题及对策——基于协商民主视角的分析

人民民主是社会主义民主的核心要义,是中国共产党和当代中国的理想和追求.我国设计了以人民代表大会制度为标志的一系列制度措施来实现人民民主,但在具体的政治实践中却面临种种问题.协商民主是强调讨论对话和审议的民主形式,恰好在某种程度上弥补了目前我国人民民主实践的不足.     

Constraining a Shadowy Future: Enacting APAs in Parliamentary Systems

Single‐party parliamentary governments often have no institutional checks on their authority. Such governments can pass and implement policies constrained only by the need to maintain party loyalty and win elections. Literature on delegation suggests that such governments would never adopt reforms such as Administrative Procedures Acts (APAs) that are designed to constrain this freedom. Nevertheless, such governments do pass APAs: Greece, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and Sweden have all done so in the past 30 years. We argue that the possibility of losing power motivates parliamentary governments, both single‐party and coalition, to trade current policy loss for future gain with APAs.     

Introduction: Parliamentary Representation in France

The constitution of the Fifth Republic, adopted in 1958, was deliberately designed to weaken parliament. This trend was reinforced by the constant empowerment of the president and the bipolarisation of political life. For this reason, but also due to some of its specificities, French political science did not pay much attention to parliament and its members. The aim of the seven papers gathered in this issue is to fix this deficiency. They cover the main aspects of parliamentary representation in France, deliver the fundamental information and tackle the central questions about it. The papers use a wide range of data, methods and theoretical approaches. They deal with MPs' conceptions and practices of their mandate, their opinions on the French regime, their activities in the constituency, values, contribution to law-making and the use of parliamentary questions, as well as their perception by the citizens.     

The Internet and Parliamentary Democracy in Europe

The overall aim of this volume is to investigate the impact of new information and communications technologies (ICTs), in particular the Internet, upon parliamentary democracy in Europe. Through a comparative study of four parliaments (the British, European, Portuguese and Swedish), our research addresses three important dimensions of the impact of the Internet on parliamentary democracy, namely, the practices, principles and rules related to the use of the Internet in a parliamentary context. It is hoped that, by comparing the experiences of the four parliaments and their Members, a European perspective on the development of and issues about ‘parliamentary e-Democracy’ can be established. The main sources of data and methodologies employed in this volume include a questionnaire survey, content analysis of parliamentary websites, interviews with parliamentarians and parliamentary staff and research workshops. Here we highlight the main features of the individual contributions included in this volume.     

Committee Parliamentary Specialization Index. Explaining MPs’ specialisation in the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados*

ABSTRACT

Nowadays legislatures are largely based on committee systems. This enables a division of work and specialisation, in the context of highly complex politics and policy development. It seems clear that MP specialisation in the field of the committee they serve on is an important political asset, both for MPs and their parliamentary party group. This paper presents the Committee Parliamentary Specialization Index. This index measures the degree an MP is specialised in the jurisdiction of the committee they serve on. In the second part of the paper, the index is applied to the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados, an interesting case for testing this multi-faceted index, to find institutional, political and individual factors that better explain the degree of MP specialisation.     

Legislative Bellwethers: The Role of Committee Membership in Parliamentary Debate

Political parties and legislators use legislative debates to establish their reputation, challenge rivals, and engage in coalition management, among many other tasks. Yet, existing theories on parliamentary debates have abstracted away from the need for information and expertise, which are costly to acquire. Drawing on the “informational” perspective on legislative organization, we address this problem by arguing that party leaders use committees as training arenas for their backbenchers. They task their assigned members with acquiring specific expertise and then rely heavily on those members during the corresponding debates. We turn to the Portuguese legislature, from 2000 to 2015, to discuss how saliency, government dynamics, and party size affect the use of experts. We test this theory using a novel approach to classify speeches that leverages the texts of legislation as training data for a supervised approach.     

Limiting Party Representation: Evidence from a Small Parliamentary Chamber

Parties are seen as vital for the maintenance of parliamentary government and as necessary intermediaries between voters and legislators; an elected parliamentary chamber not controlled by parties is highly anomalous. This study contrasts the party‐controlled Tasmanian lower house with its Independent‐dominated elected upper house and finds that the major source of constraints on party representation is not a clientelistic style of politics but the persistence of a distinctive institutional design and electoral rules based on fixed terms and annual staggered elections. The consequences of these rules are explored for their effects on voter choice and legislative behaviour.     

Financial Indiscipline in Zambia's Third Republic: The Role of Parliamentary Scrutiny

Contrary to the thesis that claims weak legislative power vis-à-vis the executive is essential if economic modernisation and development are to be driven forward in third world countries, Zambia's developmental interests would be served by making the powers of parliamentary oversight of the public finances more effective. The problematic of 'financial indiscipline' in the public sector is analysed in terms of a nest of principal-agent relationships, between legislature and executive, political executive and bureaucratic executive, Ministry of Finance and Economic Development and the spending arms of government. Evidence from the Public Accounts Committee is used to illustrate the case for more enforceable mechanisms whereby government can be made accountable for the public finances. At the same time it is argued that more wide-ranging political changes are necessary if there is to be a significant reduction in 'financial indiscipline'.     

Playing by the Rules: The Constraining Hand of Parliamentary Procedure

Parliamentary procedure has largely been neglected as a constraint on government. Political developments in the UK and a (contested) scholarly focus on institutions provide the basis for re-evaluating the consequences of procedure in the British Parliament. Procedure in both Houses of Parliament is well established and institutionalised. The capacity of procedural rules to constrain government is illustrated though empirical examples. Rational-choice theory and historical institutionalism are utilised to explain why rules endure, despite government having the political resources to change them. The 'price' of change can be too much for government in terms of time and intellectual resources, in terms of future prices and in terms of legitimacy. Consequently, procedure matters.     

The rule of law as a catalyst for sustainable democracy in Nigeria

Democracy and the rule of law are the pillars of sustainable development and the guarantee of fundamental freedoms in any society. The rule of law is one of the prerequisites to creating an enabling environment that supports socio‐economic growth and political development. The future of democracy rests with the ability of democratic governments to observe the rule of law. The rule of law is the fulcrum of democracy and the pillar upon which the structures of democracy stands. This article examines the crucial importance of the rule of law as a catalyst for the sustenance of democracy in Nigeria.     

The Timing of Cabinet Reshuffles in Five Westminster Parliamentary Systems

Despite their political prominence, cabinet reshuffles have not attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. We provide a theory of cabinet reshuffles that emphasizes both systematic and time‐varying causes. In particular, we argue that prime ministers employ cabinet reshuffles to retain power in the face of both intraparty and electoral challenges to their leadership. We use repeated‐events duration models to examine the timing of cabinet reshuffles in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom in the period 1960–2001, and find support for several of our hypotheses.     

National Parliamentary Control of EU Policy: The Challenge of Supranational Institutional Development

The history of the EU is characterised by rapid and complex institutional development. This leaves European Affairs Committees (EACs) in national parliaments with a moving target problem in their endeavours to control the government's EU policies. This paper investigates how EACs react to this challenge. Building on the rational delegation literature, it is argued that EACs are likely to adapt control instruments in tandem with institutional changes at the supranational level. Using McCubbins and Schwartz (1984, American Journal of Political Science, 28, 165–179), it is further argued that EACs are likely to want to impose both police patrol and fire alarm control on the government. These arguments are investigated in the case of Denmark during the 50-year period since the first Danish application for EU membership in 1961, and considerable support is found for the authors' hypotheses.     

The electoral connection in presidential systems: non-legislative actions inside the Chilean congress

The purpose of this article is to explore how the features of districts affect representation activities in the Chilean Congress. Based on an analysis of interventions by deputies in the so-called Incidents Hour (Hora de Incidentes), we argue that district conditions affect the kind of appeals that deputies make. Specifically, we test two main hypotheses: a) that the degree of rurality of districts predicts greater use of policy intervention at the local level (local credit claiming), and b) that distance from the centre is an incentive for deputies to taking a position on local issues (local position taking). This article contributes to an understanding of how institutional spaces in the Congress serve not only as instruments for legislation but also, and with equal relevance, for representing constituents at the district level.     

Parliamentary Rule: The US Senate Parliamentarian and Institutional Constraints on Legislator Behaviour

This article analyses the extent to which institutional rules constrain member behaviour in the United States Senate by examining the evolution of its parliamentarian. Interestingly, the US Senate parliamentarian has received surprisingly little scholarly attention given the important role she performs in the legislative process. The subsequent analysis thus provides a new understanding of the parliamentarian's role in the legislative process and the interplay between institutional rules and member behaviour in the Senate. To this end, the following analysis is situated within the context of the two primary theoretical approaches to understanding how institutional rules constrain member behaviour: path dependency and majoritarianism. These contrasting approaches provide expectations about the extent to which members will defer to the parliamentarian's interpretation of Senate rules rather than exercising their own discretionary control over those rules. Examining the evolving relationship between the parliamentarian and individual members affirms the centrality of institutional rules as a constraint on member behaviour over the past several decades. Yet such an examination also yields two surprising, and potentially contradictory, observations. First, individual senators in both parties have increasingly deferred to the parliamentarian to interpret the Senate's rules. This is surprising given that the Senate has simultaneously become more individualistic, partisan, and ideological over the same period. Second, the majority party has recently disregarded the norm of parliamentary constraint reflected in past practice and demonstrated a willingness to ignore Senate rules when doing so was necessary to achieve legislative success. This could signify a potential shift in how majorities view the constraints imposed by Senate rules if current trends of legislative dysfunction continue.