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Students of the national institutions of government in Canada are safe in taking a great deal for granted; the phrase in the British North America Act "a constitution similar in principle to that of the United Kingdom" is perhaps as important as all the rest of the act put together. It assumed a transfer of parliamentary institutions of the British type to Canada and, in fact, the transfer had taken place in eastern Canada well before 1867. The main change that has come about since is the adaptation of parliamentary government to the federal system. An assumption that provincial governments follow the parliamentary system and observe the conventions and usages associated with it may or may not be justified. In many cases provincial characteristics and habits of mind have moulded the institutions of government so as to make the features of the British ancestor barely discernible. Manitoba is a first-class example of this process of adaptation at work. The great forces that have operated are the fur trade, the premature creation of the province, and its primarily agrarian outlook. This paper is an attempt to describe and assess their influence on parliamentary government in the province.

The past year of Japanese politics has witnessed several developments in parliamentary government, prominent among which are the contest between the privy council and the cabinet, the question of the reform of the Peers, and the reorganization and growth of parties on the eve of the first general election under the manhood suffrage law.During the greater part of this time, the Wakatsuki ministry was in office. The strong leader of the Kenseikai, Viscount Kato, who had been called to form a coalition cabinet after the fall of the super-party cabinet of Kiyoura, died in January, 1926. The succeeding premior, Reijiro Wakatsuki, was a man of less prestige. Even before Kate's death, the alliance of all parties in the House of Representatives was dissolved and the Seiyukai and the Jitsugyo Doshikai, or Business-man's party, assumed the rôle of opposition parties.

For eighty years, students of parliamentary democracy have argued that durable cabinets require majority party government. Lawrence Dodd challenges this widely held belief and offers in its place a revisionist interpretation based on contemporary game theory. He argues for a fundamental alteration in existing conceptions of the relationship between party systems and parliamentary government.The author notes that cabinet durability depends on the coalitional status of the party or parties that form the cabinet. This status is created by the fractionalization, instability, and polarization that characterize the parliamentary party system. Cabinets of minimum winning status are likely to endure; as they depart from minimum winning status, their durability should decrease. Hypotheses derived from the author's theory arc examined against the experience of seventeen Western nations from 1918 to 1974. Making extensive use of quantitative analysis, the author compares behavioral patterns in multiparty and majority party parliaments, contrasts interwar and postwar parliaments, and examines the consistency of key behavioral patterns according to country. He concludes that a key to durable government is the minimum winning status of the cabinet, which may be attained in multiparty or majority party parliaments.Originally published in 1976.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905

In his latest volume, W. I. Jennings makes the comment that his researches into the working of parliament were much simpler than those he made into the operation of the cabinet. The reason for this he explains is that all the proceedings of parliament are a matter of record, whereas the cabinet proceeds in secrecy and works by stealth. On the face of it, this seems a very sound and perhaps a very obvious judgment. But I have to confess that I have found just the reverse to be the case in making a hasty review of war government. We have an immense amount of material about the working and procedure of parliamentary institutions in peace-time and comparatively little about the machinery of the cabinet; but in war-time, or at least in the last war, we have diminishing information about parliamentary activities and an ever increasing quantity of material about the cabinet operations. Take, for example, the nature and functioning of the British War Cabinet. In addition to the official reports, the proceedings of the Cabinet have been scrutinized and investigated by several noted authors. The subject of a war cabinet is a pet topic for administrative disquisition. Every text-book finds it proper to enlarge upon the experience of the last war and its consequences in administrative efficiency. But turn to the parliamentary side and you will find that the standard volumes are careful to omit all reference to war-time devices except in an incidental and apologetic manner. It seems to be axiomatic with the authorities that war-time parliamentary practices are so exceptional that they are not to be cited as precedents and are so irregular that they may be noted only as warnings of what is not good parliamentarianism. Of the innumerable volumes of memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies the centre of attention is directed almost exclusively to the working of the cabinet system, and little or no attention is devoted to the legislature's part in the matter. There are but half a dozen articles on war parliaments, and only one book is devoted to a somewhat specialized side of parliament and war. There are the volumes of Parliamentary debates, the Parliamentary Papers, and other documents, but these are much fewer than in peace, and it may be noted that when something of vital importance is to be discussed parliament resorts to its own brand of secrecy in the secret session. On the other hand, the cabinet, though its meetings are still somewhat secretive, proceeds in war to more careful recording of its doings; in fact, records seem to be of the essence of a war cabinet, and every member of the administration seems to desire to have himself on the record—posthumously at least—to a greater degree than the mere parliamentarian.