Abstract. The article analyzes the evolution of the parliamentary form of government, which highlights the growing importance of government and the progressive marginalization of Parliament. The Constituent Assembly opted for a form of parliamentary government. A decisive argument put forward during the discussion in favour of the parliamentary system was the concern over an excessive concentration of power. The wish not to repeat the experience of the fascist regime as well as the veil of ignorance regarding the result of the political elections that were to be held on 18th April, 1948 led the political forces to prefer a parliamentary government in which the executive and legislative branches were bound by a relationship of trust as this was thought to best safeguard the losers [1,p.60]. The adoption of the symmetric bicameral system that assigns the same powers to the two chambers can also be ascribed to this line of reasoning. Similar concerns conditioned the choice of electoral regulations and led to the adoption of the proportional system which faithfully reflects the balance of power between the parties decided by the electorate, unlike the majoritarian systems that reward the political forces that emerge as winners at the polls. Even the decision to introduce a new level of decentralized government, halfway between the State and the local administrative bodies (communes and provinces) can be seen as associated with the diffidence felt towards the concentration of power. In fact, the legislative function was distributed upon the centre-periphery axis, albeit in a rather unequal way. In short, the Constituent Assembly steered towards institutional solutions that focused on the balanced distribution of power regarding the form of government (parliamentary), the form of state (regional) and the electoral law (proportional representation) [2, p.422]. As we shall see, this orientation seems, at least partly and in various ways, to have been abandoned in the course of time. The evolution of the form of government has taken a different direction given that the equilibrium between Parliament and Government has shifted in favour of the latter.
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