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Unpacking ‘Positive’ and ‘Negative’ Parliamentarism

Comparative Politics
Executives
Parliaments
Institutions
Tom Louwerse
Departments of Political Science and Public Administration, Universiteit Leiden
Tom Louwerse
Departments of Political Science and Public Administration, Universiteit Leiden

Abstract

The distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ parliamentarism is usually conceptualised rather narrowly in terms of parliamentary involvement in government formation, particularly via an investiture vote (Bergman 1995). Arguably parliamentarism impacts the formation process and the type of governments that are formed, but potentially it has a much broader effect on parliamentary work and executive-legislative relations (Bäck and Rasch 2013). If we wish to study this broader impact of parliamentarism, however, we need to carefully examine the concept and its relation to other characteristics of parliamentary systems (Gerring 1999). We need to explore, conceptually and empirically, how powers relating to cabinet appointments relate to other parliamentary powers, such as legislative and control powers (Sieberer 2011, Strøm, Müller and Smith 2010) as well as existing classifications of (parliamentary) democracy in which executive-legislative relations play an important role (e.g. Lijphart 2012). Sieberer (2011) finds that the investiture vote is part of a dimension of ex ante legislative power, but how does this affect the concept of parliamentarism? The proposed paper has two contributions. First, it critically evaluates the concept of parliamentarism itself: does the positive-negative dichotomy suffice (Bergman et al. 2003), should we contrast positive and negative formation rules with positive and negative resignation rules (De Winter, 1996)? Second, it establishes how parliamentarism relates to other dimensions of the political and legislative system, both conceptually and empirically, using existing measures of parliamentary power and types of democracy for Western European democracies (Lijphart 2012, Sieberer 2011, Strøm, Müller and Smith 2010) . Conceptually and empirically parliamentarism provides a distinction between countries that cross-cuts related typologies of parliamentary democracy (proportionalism, legislative power), which potentially makes it a very valuable concept in understanding executive-legislative relations.