Executive-Legislative Power Balance: The Vote of No-Confidence and its Political Consequences

One of the most important and crucial notions in the theory of representative democracy is that voters hold their elected officials accountable for their actions. In parliamentary democracies, scholars identify the government’s responsibility to the legislature as the defining feature of such accountability. Beyond ongoing executive oversight, no-confidence motions are the main and most extreme tool given to the legislature in order to hold the executive accountable. However, despite the large literature devoted to parliamentary government, there is little academic research devoted to this mechanism. In order to help correct this lacuna in legislative studies and enable scholars to conduct cross-national research on the subject of parliaments and government termination, no-confidence votes must be conceptualized and their study needs to be systematically formulated. The aim of this paper is to offer a conceptual framework for analyzing no-confidence mechanisms, to supply the analytical criteria for cross-national research, and to delineate several country cases in order to substantiate the proposed framework. The first section of the proposed paper will present a reevaluation of the different types of no-confidence votes. The paper will then suggest a series of criteria to evaluate executive-legislative relations based on the vote of no-confidence, i.e., on the relative ease with which a government may be challenged by parliament. The following section will present a spectrum, based on these criteria, which will uncover the balance of power between the legislative and the executive branches. The paper will attempt to confirm that the criteria on which the spectrum is based are correct by then empirically placing countries on the spectrum. Finally, we will examine how (and possibly why) countries move along the spectrum. The choice of countries to test the spectrum will include countries that changed certain criteria in their vote of no-confidence but not the type of vote (such in Spain where restriction on proposing votes of no-confidence were implemented or in Sweden that shifted from a regular to an absolute majority), and countries that transformed the type of no-confidence vote (such as Belgium and Israel which moved from a regular to a constructive vote of no-confidence). In short, this proposed paper will delineate a framework for analysis of parliaments and government termination, producing an executive-legislative power spectrum that we will empirically validate. We will argue that a country’s position along the spectrum indicates the balance of power between these two branches and that a change in the no-confidence mechanism will shift not just the country’s position on the spectrum but also uncover a new power balance between parliament and government. Moreover, such a change will substantially influence other facets of parliamentary democracy, including the incentives for the creation of different types of coalitions, for parties entering or leaving the coalition during its tenure, for government stability, for coalition-opposition relations, and more. We thus see the vote of no-confidence as much more than a final stage in the life cycle of parliamentary democracy in general and in executive-legislative relations in particular. (Submitted for Panel 6: Executive-Legislative Relations)