The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (195 page)

(1848–1923)
Italian sociologist and economist. His main work as a sociologist (English translation as
The Mind and Society
, 1935) was once highly influential, but now only his arguments about the inevitable domination of political structure by élites survive. His work as an economist, by contrast, is much more influential than in his own day. He has given his name to a number of linked concepts which must be carefully distinguished:

(1) The Pareto condition. If a move from state of affairs A to another (B) leaves nobody feeling worse off than before and at least one person feeling better off, the move satisfies the Pareto condition (or criterion or principle), and the move itself is called a Pareto improvement or just Paretian. B is then Pareto- superior to A, which is Pareto-inferior to B.
(2) Pareto-optimality. If there is a state of affairs C such that no (further) Pareto improvements can be made, C is Pareto-optimal. That is, it is a situation in which nobody can be made to feel better off except by making at least one person feel worse off. The set of all Pareto optima is called the Pareto frontier.

The various Paretian concepts are central to welfare economics and
social choice
, for both technical and ideological reasons. A choice procedure which ranked some A above some B, even though everybody prefers B to A, violates the Pareto principle even in its weakest possible formulation and therefore seems perverse; nevertheless, some apparently reasonable voting procedures do just that. This strange fact is used in the proof of Arrow's impossibility theorem. Ideologically, welfare economists have seized on the Pareto principle because it has seemed value-free. Arguments about redistribution of income and wealth are necessarily value-laden, so it is regarded as uncontroversial to accept all and only Pareto improvements as improvements in welfare. This is linked to a defence of free trade, free markets, and libertarianism. A trade in which P offers money to Q in exchange for R is Paretian: P would rather have the goods than the money and Q would rather have the money than the goods. After the trade, they both feel better off, whether R happens to be an apple, a quantity of shares, or the rent of Q's property for a while.
Critics of the claim that the Pareto concepts are value-free argue variously:

(1) that market transactions may impose external costs on others and/or corrupt the morality of the participants;
(2) that Paretians slide too easily from saying ‘at the Pareto frontier, only transactions which make at least one person feel worse off can be made’ to saying ‘at the Pareto frontier no further exchanges are admissible’, which rules out any form of redistribution and regards all points on the Pareto frontier as equally justifiable; and
(3) that Paretianism and liberalism are actually incompatible at the deepest level (A. Sen , ‘The impossibility of a Paretian liberal’,
Journal of Political Economy
, 1970).

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

An elected assembly, responsible for passing legislation and granting government the right to levy taxation. Typically, it combines this role of a legislature with providing the personnel of government, thus fusing legislature and executive in a system of parliamentary government. The head of government and cabinet chosen from amongst the majority grouping in parliament are duly obliged to be accountable to parliament, accepting the principles of collective and individual responsibility which apply respectively to cabinet and ministers. If they can no longer command the support of a majority within parliament and receive a vote of no confidence, then they are obliged to resign to allow another government to be formed. Systems of parliamentary government are broadly distinguished from those based on the separation of powers principle, as in the United States. Here, the President and members of Congress are separately elected, and the executive is appointed by the President from among individuals outside Congress. Ministers are accountable only to the President who is directly accountable only to the electorate.
Systems of parliamentary government vary according to the constitutional role accorded to parliament and the electoral and party systems which determine their composition and political organization. In Britain, Parliament has unfettered authority to make, amend, or abolish any law, and no other body, including the courts, has a right to ignore its legislation. By contrast, other parliaments face constraints. In Germany, for example, the national parliament's powers are limited by the federal constitution which ensures autonomous legislative power for individual
Länder
(provinces). A constitutional court exists to ensure that the parliament passes no law that is contrary to the written constitution.
The distinctive qualities of parliaments may be explained by reference to the development of the UK Parliament and its international influences, and the varying historical contexts in which different countries have established parliaments. The UK Parliament is one of the oldest, its origins lying in the Witenagamot of the Anglo-Saxon period, the Norman great council, and the national council first called by Simon De Montfort in 1264. The parliamentary system of government that developed was seen in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to deliver political stability and efficient government at a time when other countries were experiencing political revolution and upheaval. Its historic role as the ‘mother of parliaments’ and its apparent virtues made it desirable to emulate in continental Europe and directly applicable in those countries subsumed in the British Empire. The
Commonwealth
remains one of the most thriving homes of parliamentarianism. Yet the very historic nature of the development of parliament in Britain meant that its main features pre-dated the advent of electoral democracy. The doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty derived from a battle to overturn monarchical absolutism; its electoral system built upon the original calling of representatives of the shires, boroughs, and cities, thus antedating the later arguments for representation proportionally of party voters on a national basis; its party system developed from within parliament rather than from among the people, becoming adept at socializing latecomers such as the Labour Party to such shared assumptions as parliamentary sovereignty.
The greatest challenge to national parliaments comes from the increasing international economic and political interdependence which orientates governing élites to more supranational processes of decision-making. This is starkly revealed in the case of the
European Union
(EU), where collaborative decision-making between national leaders has been joined with an EU legislative process that assumes EU law to be superior to the law of each member state. Such a development challenges, for example, the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. At the same time, however, concerns over the lack of democratic accountability in the EC law-making process may lead to continued expansion of the powers of the European Parliament, meaning that the focus of the study of parliaments may simply move from the national to the supranational context. This being the case, the historical context of the development of the European Parliament would suggest that its constitutional, electoral, and party basis would develop more on the lines of continental European parliamentary systems than that of Britain. It appears unlikely that a fully-fledged EC parliamentary system of government where legislature and executive are fused will develop.
JBr 

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

See
Boundary Commission.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

Legal immunities conferred upon members of a legislature with regard to acts they may perform in the legislature or on its behalf. The principal parliamentary privilege in the UK Parliament is that of freedom of speech in its proceeding, given statutory expression in article nine of the 1689 Bill of Rights. This marked the parliamentary victory over the royal executive in the struggle that had lasted for most of the seventeenth century and ended with the flight of James II and Parliament's choice of William II to succeed him. No member may be held to account by an outside body or individual for words spoken within Parliament. Similar notions exist in most other democratic legislatures. Also surviving, but of diminished importance, are the privileges of freedom from arrest in civil process, freedom of access to the monarch, and rights of punishment against those abusing parliamentary privilege or those held to be in contempt of parliament.
JBr