Legislative Speech in Presidential Systems

This essay constitutes a sort of corrective to the considerable attention scholars of legislative speech have given to bodies in parliamentary regimes. I survey the study of legislative speech in presidential systems by categorizing it into two types. The first presents patterns of speech across memberships as indicative of other factors such as electoral institutions and the strength of legislative parties. Here, I use Proksch and Slapin’s theoretical framework for purchase and refer to a small but growing corpus of literature on Latin America. The subject of the second is the content of speech. The approach is normative and assumes words spoken are independent variables that can have important effects on policy, politics, and the health of the broader polity. I conclude by remarking upon the opportunities computer software and newly accessible data provide for researchers of speech in the legislatures of presidential systems. I also suggest avenues for future research.

Liberal Democracies and the Control of Virtue

Following Neal Tate and Vallinder’s hypothesis on the global expansion of judicial power, this chapter draws on Alessandro Pizzorno’s seminal contribution in the late 1990s to provide a historical account of the aforementioned process. The provided account links the ‘due process revolution’ with the growing social demand for norms, as well as the building of the Sozialstaat with the transformation of parliamentary regimes. The historical method is used to identify different trajectories while emphasis is given to the emergence of political parties and their relations with the consolidation of the public sphere in fin de siècle Western, liberal democracies. A final reflection is proposed which claims that current trends towards the politicization of justice cannot be properly understood without reference to the process of judicialization of politics.

Parliamentary Regimes

This chapter focuses on parliamentary regimes. Parliamentarism, in its various forms, has the distinction of being the most widespread type of democratic government in the world. The chapter recounts the origins of parliamentary government in England, the cradle whence it was adopted and modified, in many different ways, in the rest of Europe, and was exported in tandem with the British Empire’s expansion. It next contrasts parliamentarism with presidentialism, highlighting the higher levels of executive-legislative comity in the former, and showing that the most consequential function of legislative assemblies under parliamentarism is not to legislate or even to scrutinize, but to make or break governments, which are typified by a countervailing power to convene or dissolve assemblies. The chapter then underscores the reality that parliamentary systems are not monolithic. It exhibits the variation and diversity in the universe of parliamentary regimes in the provisions for the head of state, the head of government and the cabinet, parties and elections, parliamentary control of government, and judicial review of administrative action. Finally, it concludes with a summary of major findings.

Economic Consequences of State Failure—Legal Capacity, Regulatory Activity, and Market Integration in Poland, 1505–1772

With use of innovative proxies and new annual data, I demonstrate that relatively high legal capacity and regulatory activity of the early-modern Polish parliament, the Seym, was positively associated with deeper domestic commodity market integration. Conversely, the lack of effective law-making, caused by the right of a single delegate to discontinue the Seym’s sessions, fostered market fragmentation. This indicates that early parliamentary regimes required legal capacity to harmonize domestic institutions and reduce the transaction costs. The Polish case suggests a hypothesis that the pre-1800 “Little Divergence” between European parliamentary regimes could be explained by differences in their governments’ capacities.

Perfect and Imperfect Bicameralism: A Misleading Distinction?

The aim of this contribution is to make some points on the distinction between ‘perfect’ (or equal) and ‘imperfect’ (or unequal) bicameralism and its relevance to contemporary discussions about second chambers and their constitutional position. The analysis starts with an assumption that this distinction is somehow under-theorised. The distinction between perfect and imperfect bicameralism, finally resulting in a clear prevalence of the latter, mainly focuses on two aspects: the exercise of legislative function and, in parliamentary regimes, the confidence vote. In spite of the unquestionable relevance of these two components to the activity of parliaments, these analyses are incomplete. The functions and competences of a given second chamber depend on the way it represents pluralism: the weight that each legal system attaches to the representative role of its own second chamber decisively shapes the perimeter of their functions. Important evidence for validating this claim comes from the procedures for passing constitutional amendments, in which second chambers, even in a number of ‘unequal’ bicameral systems, are put on equal footing with first chambers.

Government–opposition relations in a fragmented, personalized, and multidimensional setting: The case of Israel

Patterns of legislative activity in parliamentary regimes have long been defined by political parties and the division between government and opposition. However, several trends in recent years may challenge this distinction by mitigating the electoral connection between parliamentary behavior and electoral competition. Issue multidimensionality, party system fragmentation, and political behavioral personalization, while common to most established democracies, have been extremely pronounced in Israel. Analyzing all legislation votes taken in the Knesset between 2003 and 2014, this article uses the Israeli case to demonstrate how a fragmented opposition and the prevalence of highly personalized, nonpartisan private-member legislation, result in deviation from the familiar government–opposition divide and diminish opposition parties’ vote-seeking behavior in parliamentary votes. As an extreme case of trends that are gaining ground in most established democracies, this case study contributes to the understanding of the effects of general changes to the political system on legislative behavior.

Formation of the research tradition of studying the institute Parliamentarism as a mechanism for the establishment of democracy

The article defines the features of the process of forming the research tradition of studying the institute of parliamentarism as a mechanism for the formation of democracy. It is established that parliamentarism acts as one of the varieties of the regime of functioning of the state, to which the independence of the representative body from the people is inherent, its actual primacy in the state mechanism, the division of functions between the legislative and executive branches of government, the responsibility and accountability of the government to the parliament. It is justified that, in addition to the regime that fully meets the stated requirements of classical parliamentarism, there are regimes that can be characterized as limited parliamentary regimes. The conclusions point out that parliamentarism does not necessarily lead to a democracy regime. At the first stage of development of statehood, it functions for a long time in the absence of many attributes of democracy, but at the present stage, without parliamentarism, democracy will be substantially limited. Modern researchers of parliamentarism recognize that this institution is undergoing changes with the development of the processes of democracy and democratization. This is what produces different approaches to its definition. However, most scientists under classical parliamentarianism understand such a system, which is based on the balance of power. This approach seeks to justify limiting the rights of parliament and strengthening executive power. Keywords: Parliamentarism, research strategy, theory of parliamentarism, types of parliamentarism

ADAPTING LEGISLATIVE AGENDA SETTINGMODELS TO PARLIAMENTARY REGIMES: EVIDENCE FROM THE POLISH PARLIAMENT

This paper draws on Cox and McCubbins’ comparison of floor and cartel agenda models and adapts it to the context of multi-party parliamentary regimes with the goal of clarifying some important differences between the legislative consequences of cohesion and discipline, on the one hand, and the effects of agenda setting, on the other. Internal party discipline and/or preference cohesion receives the bulk of emphasis in comparative studies of empirical patterns of legislative behavior, generally without considering the role of the agenda. In a series of stylized models, this paper highlights important differences between having more unified parties and/or coalitions as a result of discipline and/or cohesion and the successful use of agenda control. We show that cohesion or discipline - understood as the ability to achieve voting unity - does not produce the same patterns of legislative behavior as negative agenda control. Data on legislative voting in the Polish Sejm are used to illustrate some points.

Policy, Office and Votes: The Electoral Value of Ministerial Office

Parties are not unitary actors, and legislators within the same party may have divergent interests, which complicates the understanding of parties’ motivations and behaviour. This article argues that holding a ministerial portfolio confers an electoral advantage, and so, in contrast to their co-partisans, politicians who are ministers simultaneously maximize policy, office and votes. New data on Irish elections over a thirty-year period show that ministers are insulated from the electoral cost of governing compared with their co-partisans. Differentiating between ministers and their co-partisans helps to resolve the puzzle of political parties’ choosing to enter government despite the evident electoral costs they will encounter. Moreover, previously overlooked electoral benefits of ministerial office help explain their desirability, and thus their ability to incentivize legislative behaviour in parliamentary regimes.

Parlamentarismus nebo poloprezidencialismus? Spor o klasifikaci středoevropských demokratických režimů

While reading academic papers and books on political regimes in Central Europe, one can become aware of an interesting and remarkable fact: these regimes (forms of government) are classified rather differently. Whereas some scholars tend to approach them as parliamentary regimes, others classify them as semi-presidential ones. The major dividing line between these two perspectives runs between a large group of English-writing scholars based outside Central Europe and those from Central Europe itself. Having reviewed a large number of relevant studies in this field, the authors of this article argue that the key reason for the different assessments of Central European regimes resides mainly in a different theoretical (but also methodological) approach, which has important implications when considering how these regimes are treated in various studies. Whereas the group of English-writing scholars tends to adopt a minimalist institutional definition suggested by Robert Elgie, most Central European scholars prefer an approach (inspired by Duverger or Sartori) that emphasizes presidential powers, which are irrelevant to Elgie’s definition.