Cabinet Ministers and Parliamentary Government

by Shepsle, Kenneth A.

• ISBN13: 9780521438377
• ISBN10: 0521438373
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-09-01
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

One of the key constitutional features of a parliamentary democracy is that the political executive, or cabinet, derives its mandate from-and is politically responsible to-the legislature. What makes a parliamentary democracy democratic is that, once a legislative election has been held, the new legislature has the power to dismiss the incumbent executive and replace it with a new one. Moreover, it sits essentially as a court, passing continual judgment on the record of the executive, and continuous sentence on its future prospects. That is how citizens, indirectly, choose and control their government. But the relationship between legislature and executive is not one-sided. The executive typically has the authority to recommend dissolution of parliament and is usually drawn from the parliament. Executive personnel, therefore, have intimate familiarity with parliamentary practices; and for their part, parliamentary personnel aspire to executive appointments. Surprisingly little is known about the constitutional relationship between legislature and executive in parliamentary regimes; the present volume seeks to remedy this. Leading specialists on institutional politics in the major parliamentary democracies have been encouraged to describe legislative- executive interactions in terms of a common theoretical framework. The country-specific chapters have, as their central themes, cabinet decision making and cabinet relationships with the parliament, parliamentary parties, and the permanent civil service. The editors have provided a theoretical overview at the outset and, in their conclusion, have made theoretical sense of the empirical variation in parliamentary practices.

Table of Contents

List of tables and figures

Series editors'

Preface

Introduction

Cabinet ministers and governmnet formation in parliamentary democracies

Coalition Systems

Models of government and the Australian cabinet Wolfgang

The political role of Norwegian cabinet ministers

The Netherlands: ministers and cabinet policy

The political role of cabinet ministers in Irel

Finland: ministerial autonomy, constitutional collectivism, and party oligarchy

Cabinet ministers and policy-making in Belgium: the impact of coalition constraints

The role of cabinet ministers in the French Fourth Republic

The political autonomy of cabinet ministers in the French Fifth Republic

The role of German ministers in cabinet decision making Ferdin

Cabinet ministers and parliamentary government in Sweden

The political role of cabinet ministers in Italy

Majority Party Government Systems

Ministerial autonomy in Britain

Collective cabinet decision making in New Zeal

The interpersonal dynamics of decision making in Canadian provincial cabinets

Cabinet decision making in the Hellenic Republic 1974-1992

Cabinet government in theoretical perspective

Index

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