Party Systems and Parliamentarianism

This paper offers an explanation for the long-run development of parliamentarianism in Western Europe. In many polities, parliamentarianism is what renders other institutions such as suffrage and electoral rules democratically meaningful, and its workings as a regime in modern times is the subject of much research. However, unlike other institutions, the development of parliamentarianism as an institution in its own right has been given scant attention. Conceptualized as an institution that regulates expectations about how a government may be terminated, and defined as government responsibility to parliament only, parliamentarianism was the outcome of serious struggles among actors, particularly political parties and heads of state. In this paper, I theorize that the development of parliamentarianism depended on party-system features such as high parliamentary party fragmentation, seat share volatility, and ideological polarization. These features prevented parties from enforcing parliamentary practices while simultaneously increasing the maneuvering room of (unelected) heads of state. I elaborate hypotheses concerning the relationship between these features on the one hand and the ability and willingness of parties to enforce parliamentary practices on the other hand. I test the propositions against nine century-long country histories, using panel-data techniques on a newly compiled data set, which includes the first estimates of how West European parliamentarianism has developed in the long run. The results are in line with the expectations, suggesting that party system features influence parliamentary practices. This also informs discussions about the status of contemporary parliamentarianism.