The Adoption of Positive and Negative Parliamentarism: Systemic or Idiosyncratic Differences?

The distinction between positive and negative parliamentarism relies on the way parliament is involved in the government formation process: countries where the government needs to win an investiture vote are said to have positive parliamentarism, while countries in which the government just needs to be tolerated by parliament are said to have negative parliamentarism. In short these two forms of parliamentarism are defined only on the basis of the rules governing cabinet inauguration, that are generally established in the Constitution. However, to date it is still rather unclear whether the choice of one system or the other is only due to idiosyncratic reasons or it has a systemic nature. In this case, we should expect this choice to be related to other constitutional and micro-institutional rules regulating the executive-legislative relations. To shed some light on this question, this paper adopt a mixed research strategy. Firstly, with an extensive focus on Western Europe, we assess whether and to what extent countries adopting positive and negative parliamentarism differ on several constitutional and micro-institutional features related to the executive-legislative subsystem – from the rules about parliamentary agenda, to the main features of legislative procedure, the degree of parliamentary centrality in the budgetary process. Secondly, we perform a more in-depth analysis focusing on the choice of the voting system in three South European countries whose constitutions were drafted after the end of an authoritarian regime: Italy, Portugal and Spain. This comparison, devoted to three cases of discontinuous democracy - will show whether the adoption of positive (Italy and Spain) and negative (Portugal) parliamentarism was related to a more general conception of the executive-legislative relations.