The Roman Republic, established in the 6th century BC, had legislative assemblies, who had the final say regarding the election of magistrates, the enactment of new statutes, the carrying out of capital punishment, the declaration of war and peace, and the creation (or dissolution) of alliances.
[15] The first recorded signs of a council to decide on different issues in ancient Iran dates back to 247 BC, the time of the Parthian Empire.
Parthians established the first Iranian empire since the conquest of Persia by Alexander and by their early years of reigning, an assembly of the nobles called “Mehestan” was formed that made the final decision on very serious issues.
[17] The Mehestan Assembly, which consisted of Zoroastrian religious leaders and clan elders exerted great influence over the administration of the kingdom.
According to the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme, this is the earliest documented manifestation of the European parliamentary system with some temporal continuity.
After coming to power, King Alfonso IX, potentially facing an attack by his two neighbours, Castile and Portugal, decided to summon the "Royal Curia".
This was a medieval organisation composed of aristocrats and bishops but because of the seriousness of the situation and the need to maximise political support, Alfonso IX took the decision to also call the representatives of the urban middle class from the most important cities of the kingdom to the assembly.
Property rights of the king and his subjects, as well as of ecclesiastical bodies, were addressed in the previous Cortes of Coimbra in 1211 (which included members of the nobility and the clergy).
[30][31] In England, Simon de Montfort is remembered as one of the fathers of representative government for holding two famous parliaments.
[34] In the 17th century, the Parliament of England pioneered some of the ideas and systems of liberal democracy culminating in the Glorious Revolution and passage of the Bill of Rights 1689.
By the 19th century, the Great Reform Act 1832 led to parliamentary dominance, with its choice invariably deciding who was prime minister and the complexion of the government.
In the radicalised times at the end of World War I, democratic reforms were often seen as a means to counter popular revolutionary currents.
Another obstacle was the political parties' unpreparedness for long-term commitments to coalition cabinets in the multi-party democracies on the European continent.
The resulting "Minority-Parliamentarism" led to frequent defeats in votes of confidence and almost perpetual political crisis which further diminished the standing of democracy and parliamentarism in the eyes of the electorate.
Many early 20th-century regimes failed through political instability and/or the interventions of heads of state, notably King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy's failure to back his government when facing the threat posed by Benito Mussolini in 1922, or the support given by King Alfonso XIII of Spain to a prime minister using dictatorial powers in the 1920s.