Despite the seminal nature of Strøm’s (1990) work, little recent research has addressed the potential for investiture rules and minority-right rules to impact whether minority governments or majority governments emerge following general elections. In this paper, we re-examine the politics of minority governments, suggesting that legislative rules and procedures systematically impact the likelihood of minority governments emerging and staying in office. To test these propositions, we collect and analyze new data on the rules and procedures of parliaments related to government formation and maintenance in 45 advanced, mostly European, democracies. Our new, more in-depth measures of investiture rules reveals that rules matter and that the (previously unexplored) details of investiture procedures are particularly important for explaining minority government formation. We also find evidence that minority governments correlate positively with legislatures that disperse power away from the majority.
