Parliamentary Reform

Citizens’ Assemblies and Parliamentary Reform in Canada*

Canada, like Australia, is a federation and, like Australia, has a system of government based on British-derived parliamentary and monarchical traditions. But Canada’s structure of government differs in two important respects: it has no history of strong, elected upper houses in its state and federal parliaments and, since 1982, it has had a constitutionally entrenched Charter of Rights and Fre...

In Search of Successful Reform: The Politics of Opposition and Consensus in OECD Parliamentary Democracies

Exemelification of Parliamentary Debates

Parliamentary debates are an interesting domain to apply state-of-the-art information retrieval technology. Parliamentary debates are highly structured transcripts of meetings of politicians in parliament. These debates are an important part of the cultural heritage of countries; they are often free of copy-right; citizens often have a legal right to inspect them; and several countries make gre...

Are Parliamentary Systems Better?

The institutional differences between presidential and parliamentary rule are well known, yet the practical effects of these divergent constitutional arrangements within democratic polities have received scant attention. This paper employs a global dataset to test the relationship between a historical measure of parliamentary rule and fourteen indicators ranging across three policy areas: polit...

Parliamentary or Presidential Government?

I compare parliamentary and presidential government in a model with an executive and a decisive parliamentarian, whose ability to submit bills of high quality, or learn their quality, respectively, is private information. After observing the actions of each politician, the voter chooses whether to retain each politician or replace them with a randomly drawn alternative. Under presidential gover...