Prime ministers, the vote of confidence and the management of coalition terminations between elections

Abstract

When coalition leaders have powers to call a vote of confidence, they can invoke the threat of government resignation or early elections, and raise other actors’ costs of voting down the government. In this paper, this insight is applied to coalition replacements. The procedure, argued here, allows leaders to reduce their risk of losing office between elections by (i) managing the coalition’s cohesion and (ii) denying parliament the option of replacing the government without intervening elections. Premiers, moreover, can be expected to use these powers for partisan benefit, protecting primarily their own rather than their coalition partners’ incumbency status. To test this expectation, a novel measure of vote of confidence powers is applied to the analysis of coalition replacement risks in 20 European democracies. The results show that premiers with extensive confidence powers significantly reduce their risk of replacement between elections while their coalition partners do not benefit equally.

Keywords:

• Vote of confidence
• coalition government
• European governments
• government termination
• non-electoral replacement

Acknowledgements

We thank the editors, Bjørn Erik Rasch and Reuven Hazan, and the participants of the workshops at the ECPR Joint Sessions workshop in Mons in 2019 and at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2020 for their careful reading and helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper and the reviewers of West European Politics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability

The replication data for this study will be available from the corresponding author’s website https://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/academic-faculty/petra-schleiter.html

Notes

1 While this paper focuses on the differential implications of the vote of confidence within coalitions for dominant and junior partners, some (but not all) of the bargaining advantages conferred by the procedure can also be expected to apply to the management of legislative conflict within single-party governments.

2 Note, that the use of the vote of confidence procedure is not cost-free to a prime minister. As we discuss below, these costs feature in the strategic considerations that premiers must weigh in using the procedure to manage cabinet replacement risks.

3 The literature on political surfing, for example, shows that prime ministers with extensive constitutional power to dissolve parliament can trigger early elections for partisan advantage, i.e. to realize electoral bonuses by timing elections to economic upturns, or to evade accountability by ‘cutting and running’ when they anticipate worse times ahead (Goplerud and Schleiter 2016; Kayser 2005; Schleiter and Tavits 2016; Smith 2004).

4 But note Lupia and Strom’s (1995) insight that parliamentary parties with the power to trigger parliamentary dissolution may choose to apply their bargaining power to achieve a non-electoral government replacement. In semi-presidential democracies, Fernandes and Magalhães (2016) find that presidential government dismissal powers raise the risk of replacement terminations.

5 https://www.dw.com/en/greek-prime-minister-alexis-tsipras-wins-confidence-vote/a-47113131

6 Exceptions are Italy and the constitutional monarchies in our sample. In Italy, the vote of confidence rules form part of the legislature’s standing procedures; in most of the constitutional monarchies, the procedure exists as a matter of convention (Huber 1996).

7 Note that the coefficient of PM dissolution powers in model (2) is an artefact of complete separation. No junior partner changes occur in a context characterized by PM dissolution powers.

8 This comparison gives confidence in the theoretically derived dimensions and penalties that our index employs. Future work could explore the implications of relaxing the assumption that the magnitude of specific numeric penalties exactly captures the true underlying constraints on PM bargaining power while respecting the theoretically derived ordering of the penalties.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Petra Schleiter

Petra Schleiter is a Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Oxford. Her research examines the effects of political institutions using comparative and experimental research designs. [[email protected]]

Georgina Evans

Georgina Evans is a PhD candidate in Government and AM student in Statistics at Harvard University. Her research interests include European parliamentary politics and electoral politics. [[email protected]]