The Investiture Vote and Government Formation and Survival in Parliamentary Democracies

A key, unresolved, question in the study of coalition government is the design and consequences of the investiture rule in parliamentary systems. Strom, Budge and Laver (1994) suggest that investiture rules potentially constrain cabinet formation, for example, if the outgoing government or largest party is favored in the investiture process. Bergman (1993) finds that minority governments are more likely to emerge in the absence of positively formulated rules – i.e., where the legislature must vote to accept or reject the nominated government. For others, logically, the need for a government to win any vote of confidence matters more than the presence or absence of an early investiture vote – whether a government needs to win a vote to be appointed or needs to win a vote to stay in office is largely immaterial (see further, Laver and Schofield 1998). Meanwhile, Golder (2010) finds that investiture rules have no effect on the amount of time it takes political parties to negotiate the formation of a government. Clearly, the uncertainty in the existing literature warrants a fresh look at the design and consequences of investiture rules. Largely missing from existing research is an assessment of how variation in the details of investiture rules matter for government formation and survival. The aim of paper is to address this issue by moving beyond existing work, which treats the investiture vote, at most, as a ‘present’ or ‘absent’ dummy variable in studies of government formation and survival. The real world of investiture procedures involves significant variation in design and detail. What are these details and how do they matter? We examine all parliamentary democracies that have existed since 1946, using a new data set that distinguishes different forms of investiture votes.