Parliamentary Government: the Rise of a Concept

Abstract

The term ‘parliamentary government’ had hardly been accepted when — following Bagehot’s seminal work on the English constitution (1867) — the view was expressed that the British system was more a form of executive government or prime ministerial government. Indeed parliamentary government as a notion was vague. It was used synonymously with ‘representative government’, which was even less precise: it included the existence of representation but the notion did not indicate whether it was a system governed mainly by the nobility, the clergy and the estates (the commons, as in eighteenth-century Poland and Sweden) or with a degree of participation by the monarch, as in Britain, or a constitutional monarchy with clear dominance by the monarch (as in most territories in the German confederation, 1814–66).KeywordsParliamentary SystemParliamentary GovernmentParliamentary MajorityConstitutional MonarchyConstitutional CompetenceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.