History of parliamentarism

Since ancient times, when societies were tribal, there were councils or a headman whose decisions were assessed by village elders. This is often referred to as tribalism. Some scholars argue that in ancient Mesopotamia there was a primitive democratic government where the kings were assessed by council.^[1] The same has been said about ancient India, where some form of assemblies existed, and therefore there was some form of democracy.^[2] However, these claims are not accepted by most scholars, who see these forms of government as oligarchies.^{[3][4][5][6][7]}

The term parliament is applied to several different kinds of medieval assembly, and claims that an institution was the "first parliament" depend on the criterion used, such as antiquity, representation, legislative authority or institutional continuity.^[21]

The Icelandic Alþingi, established at Þingvellir around 930, was the national assembly of the Icelandic Commonwealth and combined legislative and judicial functions. Its supreme institution, the Lögrétta, passed laws, settled disputes and granted exemptions from the law. It was composed of chieftains (goðar), later joined by bishops, and their non-voting advisers, rather than representatives elected by towns or territorial constituencies.^[22]

One tradition traces the origins of the Parliament of Sicily to 1130, when Roger II convened the Curiae generales in Palermo.^[23] These early royal assemblies consisted of nobles and ecclesiastics. Representatives of cities first participated under Frederick II, in assemblies convened between 1232 and 1240, when the Sicilian institution became one of the earliest such assemblies to acquire more regular institutional characteristics.^[21]

In 1188, Alfonso IX of León convened a Curia Regia attended by elected representatives of towns and cities alongside the monarch, the clergy and the nobility. UNESCO describes the resulting Decreta of León as containing the oldest known written information concerning the European parliamentary system and as the first documented institutional participation of the common people in higher-level decision-making through elected urban representatives.^[24]

The parliament of the Patria del Friuli is first documented in 1231. Convened and presided over by the Patriarch of Aquileia, it included clergy, nobles, cities and other communities represented by envoys, and exercised legislative, fiscal, military and judicial functions.^[25]

The Parliament of Scotland developed from the king's council and is identifiable as a national law-making institution from the early 13th century. Representatives of the royal burghs began to appear during the 14th century, although their attendance did not become regular until later.^[26][27]

In Portugal, the Cortes of Leiria of 1254 were the first Portuguese Cortes in which representatives of the municipalities sat alongside the clergy and nobility.^[28] Earlier Cortes, including those held at Coimbra in 1211, had been attended by members of the clergy and nobility but not by municipal representatives.^[29]

In England, the Provisions of Oxford of 1258 placed the government of Henry III under the authority of a council and provided for regular meetings of parliament.^[30] In 1265, Simon de Montfort summoned representatives of both the towns and the shires to discuss matters of national concern alongside the nobility and clergy. This assembly is regarded as an important forerunner of the House of Commons.^[31]

In the Principality of Catalonia, the Catalan Courts of 1283 established that legislation required agreement between the monarch and the estates of the realm, ending the monarch's position as the sole legislative authority. The Courts consisted of the military estate representing the nobility, the ecclesiastical estate and the royal estate representing towns under the monarch's jurisdiction.^[32]

In the 17th century, during the early modern period, the Parliament of England pioneered some of the ideas and systems of liberal democracy culminating in the Glorious Revolution and passage of the Bill of Rights 1689 and Claim of Right Act 1689 in Scotland.^[33][34] The Glorious Revolution marked the beginning of the English constitutional monarchy and its role as one of the three elements of government.^[35]

In the Kingdom of Great Britain, the monarch, in theory, chaired cabinet and chose ministers. In practice, King George I's inability to speak English led the responsibility for chairing cabinet to go to the leading minister, literally the prime or first minister, Robert Walpole. The gradual democratisation of Parliament with the broadening of the voting franchise increased Parliament's role in controlling government, and in deciding who the king could ask to form a government. By the 19th century, the Great Reform Act 1832 led to parliamentary dominance, with its choice invariably deciding who was prime minister and the complexion of the government.^[36][37]

Other countries gradually adopted what came to be called the Westminster model of government, with an executive answerable to parliament (fusion of powers), but exercising powers nominally vested in the head of state, in the name of the head of state. Hence the use of phrases like Her Majesty's government or His Excellency's government. Such a system became particularly prevalent in older British dominions, many of whom had their constitutions enacted by the British parliament; examples include Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Irish Free State and the Union of South Africa. Some of these parliaments evolved, were reformed from, or were initially developed as distinct from their original British model: the Australian Senate, for instance, has since its inception more closely reflected the US Senate than the British House of Lords; whereas since 1950 there is no upper house in New Zealand.^[38][39][40]

In medieval and early modern France, the term Parlement did not denote a representative legislature. The Parlement of Paris, which developed from the judicial section of the royal Curia regis under Louis IX, was a sovereign court of justice. Its magistrates judged cases, registered royal enactments and could address remonstrances to the king, but they did not sit as elected representatives of the population.^[41]

France's earliest national representative assemblies were the Estates General. In 1302, during his conflict with Pope Boniface VIII, Philip IV summoned prelates, barons and delegates from a number of towns. This meeting is traditionally regarded as an early form of the Estates General and has been identified in comparative scholarship as the beginning of parliament in France when the participation of non-noble urban representatives is used as the defining criterion.^[42][43] The Estates General represented the clergy, nobility and Third Estate, but remained dependent on royal convocation and was principally consultative rather than a permanent legislative institution.^[42]

A different stage began during the French Revolution. On 17 June 1789, the deputies of the Third Estate, joined by some members of the clergy, declared themselves the National Assembly. They claimed to represent the nation as a single and indivisible body, rather than the three orders separately, and asserted authority over taxation and the drafting of a constitution. On 9 July, the body renamed itself the National Constituent Assembly. It can therefore be regarded as France's first representative assembly to claim national sovereignty, although it was not the country's first representative assembly.^[44]

The Constitution of 1791 subsequently created a unicameral Legislative Assembly, which first met on 1 October 1791. It was the first regular national legislature established under a written French constitution. The system was nevertheless a constitutional monarchy based on a strict separation of powers rather than parliamentary government: the king appointed and dismissed the ministers, who were not politically responsible to the Assembly.^[45]

Following the fall of Napoleon, the Charter of 1814 established a bicameral representative monarchy under the Bourbon Restoration, although sovereignty remained with the king and the powers of the two chambers were initially limited.^[46] The revised charter adopted under the July Monarchy in 1830 produced a more balanced constitutional system and moved France closer to modern parliamentary government. Practices such as ministerial interpellation followed by debate and a vote developed during this period.^[47]

The constitutional laws of 1875 created the institutions of the Third Republic. Following the 16 May 1877 crisis and the resignation of President Patrice de MacMahon in 1879, constitutional practice established a predominantly parliamentary regime in which the government depended on the support of the Chamber of Deputies and the political role of the president was reduced.^[48][49] The Fourth Republic was also parliamentary and accorded primacy to the legislature, but was marked by frequent changes of government.^[50]

The present Fifth Republic, established in 1958, combines parliamentary and presidential features and is commonly classified as a semi-presidential system, particularly since the introduction of direct presidential elections in 1962.^[51] Under Article 24 of the Constitution, the Parliament of France consists of both the directly elected National Assembly and the indirectly elected Senate. The modern National Assembly is therefore a chamber of Parliament, rather than the whole Parliament.^[52]

Unlike the British and French systems, the United States adopted a presidential system based on a stricter institutional separation between the executive and the legislature. Specifically, it adopted the United States Constitution in 1787 to replace the Articles of Confederation.^[53]

During the Confederation period (1781 to 1789), the Articles proved ineffective. They established a unicameral body called the United States in Congress Assembled, with no chief executive or court system. It lacked the power to levy taxes, regulate foreign or interstate commerce, or effectively negotiate with foreign powers.^[54]

In Federalist No. 69, published in 1788, Alexander Hamilton described the powers of George III. Despite nominally being a constitutional monarch, he retained considerable powers. Hamilton said that the powers of the president of the United States were “in substance much inferior” to George III’s powers in the 1780s.^[55]

At the time, the Acts of Union 1800 had not yet occurred, and William Pitt the Younger was prime minister. Prime ministers could be forced to resign by the monarch due to policy disagreements. It was only until the 1802 United Kingdom general election that true parliamentary sovereignty was achieved. Pitt had been forced to resign in 1801 due to George III’s opposition to Catholic emancipation.^[56]

The revolutions of 1848 in Europe largely failed to strengthen parliaments in most European countries, as conservative forces regained control and reversed changes, but they made a return to the pre-1848 status quo impossible, leading to gradual, long-term parliamentary development across much of Europe.^[57]

An early example of parliamentary government occurred in today's Netherlands and Belgium during the Dutch revolt in 1581, when the sovereign, legislative and executive powers were taken over by the States General of the Netherlands from the then-monarch, King Philip II of Spain.

During the 19th-century, urbanisation, the Industrial Revolution and, modernism fueled the political left's struggle for democracy and parliamentarism. Democracy and parliamentarism became increasingly prevalent in Europe in the years after World War I, partially imposed by the democratic victors, Great Britain and France, on the defeated countries and their successors, notably Germany's Weimar Republic and the new Austrian Republic. In the radicalised times at the end of World War I, democratic reforms were often seen as a means to counter popular revolutionary currents. Thus established democratic regimes suffered however from limited popular support, in particular from the political right.

Another obstacle was the political parties' unpreparedness for long-term commitments to coalition cabinets in the multi-party democracies on the European continent. The resulting "Minority-Parliamentarism" led to frequent defeats in votes of confidence and almost perpetual political crisis which further diminished the standing of democracy and parliamentarism in the eyes of the electorate.

Many early 20th-century regimes failed through political instability and/or the interventions of heads of state, notably King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy's failure to back his government when facing the threat posed by Benito Mussolini in 1922, or the support given by King Alfonso XIII of Spain to a prime minister using dictatorial powers in the 1920s. Finland is sometimes given as a counter-example, where a presidential democracy was established after a failed revolution and more than three months of bitter Civil War in Finland (1918). In 1932 the Lapua Movement attempted a coup d'état, aiming at the exclusion of Social Democrats from political power, but the Conservative President Svinhufvud maintained his democratic government. Parliamentarism was (re-)introduced by Svinhufvud's successor Kyösti Kallio in 1937.

• Democratisation § Historical cases
• History of democracy
• List of democracy and elections-related topics
• List of political systems in France
• Parliament in the Making
• Prime minister
• Parliamentary sovereignty
• Sejm of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
• The History of Parliament

• Andress, David (2009). 1789: The Threshold of the Modern Age. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 9780374100131.
• Hague, William (2005). William Pitt the Younger. HarperPerennial. ISBN 978-0-00-714720-5.
• Klarman, Michael (2016). The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution. Oxford University Press.