The Confidence Relationship between Parliament and Government

The core feature of parliamentary democracies is that the executive emerges from and is responsible to the legislature. The premise of the responsibility of the executive to the legislature is expressed through the parliament granting or withdrawing confidence in the government. The literature has identified three pivotal votes that express legislative confidence in the executive: the vote of investiture, the vote of confidence, and the vote of no confidence. In addition, parliamentary dissolution has also been associated with the confidence of the parliament in government. While the existing literature acknowledges that these four procedures create a "confidence relationship", the existence of several confidence relations, their conceptual definitions, institutional procedures, and dynamics, are still underdeveloped. Moreover, several works argue that these procedures interact with each other, but there is still no comprehensive theoretical framework of the confidence relationship as a unified concept. This paper defines and examines the various confidence relations and proposes a new integrated framework of the currently separate mechanisms that make up the confidence relationship between parliaments and governments. It also assesses if these procedures are empirically connected, categorizes the patterns of confidence relations, and delineates the possible combinations of the different procedures into categories of confidence relationships. Methodologically the four confidence procedures are unified under one operationalization of the confidence relationship and empirically applied to more than 20 parliamentary democracies.