The Influence of Parliamentary Behavior on Regime Stability: Some Conceptual Clarifications

It is hardly novel to call attention to influence of parliaments on political stability. Parliaments originated as assemblages convened to gain consent for a king's government. The deepest roots of (the British) Parliament are not to be found in legislation, nor even in supply of finance, a recent work notes, but in king's need for some process, however rough and ready, by which he could obtain consent, or at least acquiescence, of influential sections of people to his acts of government.1 Parliament's assertion of lawmaking power in seventeenth century England, and American colonists' use of representative assemblies in eighteenth century to assert their interests against royal governors, caused constitution makers of United States to emphasize policy-making functions of institution which they significantly called legislature. But in Great Britain lawmaking never came to be regarded as distinctive activity of Parliament, even in great nineteenth century analyses of that body. Both John Stuart Mill and Walter Bagehot saw Parliament more as a consensus-building than as a policy-making institution. Mill wrote that Parliament was radically unfit for the function of governing. He explained that importance of Parliament was as the nation's Committee of Grievances, and its Congress of Opinions, where all political views are: