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Abstract
The core feature of parliamentary democracy is government responsibility to the legislature. The most important instrument by which parliament can express its lack of support for the government is the vote of no confidence. This mechanism remains significantly under-studied, and research on votes of no confidence calls out for systematic attention. It is also timely because parliamentary democracies are making it procedurally harder for parliament to terminate the government. Through developing and conceptualising a series of indicators that affect the relative ease with which parliament can challenge and terminate government, this study proposes the first ever framework for analysing votes of no confidence. It then empirically locates countries in the framework and discusses those that have shifted over time. The goal of this study is to begin to fill an academic lacuna concerning, arguably, the defining feature of parliamentary democracy.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2019 European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR) Joint Sessions of Workshops, Université catholique de Louvain, Mons, Belgium, and at the 2020 workshop on ‘Parliaments and Government Termination Revisited’, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. The authors thank the participants at these workshops for their constructive criticisms and suggestions, as well as the anonymous reviewers of West European Politics.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 A vote of no confidence requiring more than an absolute majority, such as two-thirds of the parliament in Madagascar and Rwanda, is found only in non-democratic countries (Yamamoto Citation2007; Parline database on national parliaments, Oversight).
2 In order to prevent a minority from becoming a temporary majority, a minimum quorum of parliamentary representatives who have to be present can be set for a vote of no confidence to take place. Some countries have no quorum requirement (examples include Portugal, Sweden, and Israel), while others set a quorum of at least one-half of the parliament (Austria, Ireland, and the UK, among others). If the vote of no confidence requires an absolute majority in order to pass, that is, in effect, a majority quorum requirement as well.
3 Italy is an interesting case of, until 1988, both giving precedence to secret voting (by the request of 20 deputies or 10 senators) and having secret voting on the final vote on all bills (Giannetti Citation2010). Hence, while it is not stated that a vote of no confidence must be secret, it could (easily) be.
4 There are also laws that define the time after which a vote of no confidence cannot take place (in Portugal this is three days). Such a limit constrains both the parliament and the government, neither of whom can drag the issue out endlessly. Some countries set both a lower and an upper limit; in Bulgaria a vote of no confidence must take place no earlier than three days and no later than a week after it has been introduced.
5 One could justifiably argue that combining the indicators into one score implies an inevitable loss of information. However, we believe that since the indicators in each stage are related, their aggregation presents a better, although more basic, picture. Researchers can disaggregate the scores for each stage, for example, in order to implement advanced multivariate analysis. Nonetheless, for the purpose of delineating a novel comprehensive framework of the defining characteristic of parliamentary democracies, we believe that it is preferable to combine the scores in each stage.
6 Dissolution powers are defined here as ‘the constitutional prerogatives of a political actor to (a) initiate or (b) advance a political process that can result in early elections, or to (c) decide the early dissolution of parliament’ (Goplerud and Schleiter 2016: 430). We look only into parliament’s ability to dissolve itself and not the dissolution powers of the government or the head of state, since we are interested in the parliament’s ability to challenge the government.
7 There are truly rare cases where both houses sit in a joint session on a vote of no confidence. We found only one such case among democratic countries and that is Romania.
8 Out of the 14 countries we examine this seems to be quite a significant number, but these are in fact the only countries among European parliamentary democracies where this is the case.
9 These are the most sensitive quantitative measurements of the vote of no-confidence we could find in order to perform our justification. And yet, as stated previously, these measurements lack the distinctions we provide, both in terms of the number of indicators we include and in distinguishing between the initiating and the voting stages.
10 Sieberer’s measure is, as elaborated, the lone existing measure based on multiple indicators, but it still only broadly distinguish between three elements – the two most important of these are on what we define as the voting stage alone. The measure is limited, not flawed, compared to our comprehensive and more sensitive framework, and thus the strong correlation with our voting stage alone.
11 Poland also crossed the threshold (from the ‘small constitution’ of 1992 to the 1997 constitution) but this was not after a lengthy period of democratic rule.
12 The new Swedish constitution took effect in 1975, while a partial constitutional reform (in which the rules of the no confidence vote were introduced) went into effect in 1971.
13 There are two more state reforms that were discussed in Belgium, the fifth state reform (2001) and the sixth state reform (2011).
14 We believe that this normative consequence has not been lost in the empirical developments. It is not just by coincidence that all seven countries that adopted the constructive vote of no confidence have retained the requirement of an investiture vote.
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Notes on contributors
Tal Lento
Tal Lento is a PhD student in the Advanced Graduate Studies Program (‘TELEM’), Department of Political Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her dissertation focuses on the adoption of the constructive vote of no confidence in Israel and in Belgium. [[email protected]]
Reuven Y. Hazan
Reuven Y. Hazan is Professor and Chair in Israeli Democracy and Politics, Department of Political Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include legislative studies, parties and party systems, elections and electoral politics. [[email protected]]