Search

This paper analyses the institutions associated with government termination in parliamentary systems: no-confidence and confidence motions, and the early dissolution of the parliament. We consider constitutional texts for all European countries between 1800 and 2019 and identify two broad trends: (1) the constitutionalisation of practices that have first emerged as the result of strategic interactions between the government and the parliament; (2) the tendency towards protecting both the executive and the parliament from mutual interference. While the first tendency has culminated with an almost universal constitutionalisation of the principle of parliamentarism in European constitutions, the second led to the protection of executives and the extension of effective legislative terms. We suggest that these constitutional developments are associated with the stabilisation of parliamentarism after World War II and conclude that although parliamentarism remains a flexible system, contemporary regimes do not function like their forebears did in the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has shown that we believe more in the reality of climate change when we experience warmer-than-usual temperatures. This reflects a psychological process in which easily accessible information from personal weather experiences is used as a heuristic to form climate opinions. This paper replicates and extends upon a research design and results of Egan and Mullin to provide the first systematic European study of the Local Warming Effect. Based on data from 12 European countries, the analysis shows that when objective temperatures increase by two standard deviations (5 °C) relative to normal temperatures, climate opinions are strengthened by around 0.5–1.0 percentage points – comparable to the effect of a full step to the left on a 0–10 political ideology scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]