The Confidence Relationship and the ‘Constructive’ Turn in Parliamentary Democracies

Parliamentary democracies are defined by the confidence relationship linking the cabinet to parliament (Sartori, 1997; Lijphart, 2012). Confidence is tested at various points throughout the life of a parliament, starting with an investiture vote following an election, confidence and non-confidence votes during the term, and dissolution if an early election is required. Even though confidence is fluid throughout the parliamentary term (Desserud, 2006), comparativists and country experts tend to treat these four mechanisms as separate mechanisms of government formation and termination linking cabinet and parliament (for example, see Rasch et al., 2015; Sieberer, 2015; Huber, 1996, Williams, 2011; Strom et al., 2003; Heard 2007; Norton, 2016; Goplerud and Schleiter, 2016; Lento and Hazan, 2022). Consequently, comparative political science is missing a comprehensive examination of the confidence relationship. My dissertation project constructs the Parliamentary Selectoral Power Index (PSPI) to catalogue the rules of the confidence relationship and assess whether these rules help or hinder parliament's selectoral power, which is defined as its ability to control its own fate, relative to cabinet. This paper builds upon on the PSPI to develop a typology of the confidence relationship. It organizes cases based on the number of ‘constructive’ components, i.e. rules that promote parliament taking an active role in controlling its fate through the four delegation and accountability mechanisms. By using a sample of 28 European and Anglosphere parliamentary democracies, the paper points to a shift towards constructive rules across established parliamentary democracies. Generally, more constructive rules correspond to more parliamentary selectoral power. However, cases with more constructive rules feature greater codification and frequently include rules constraining parliament. Thus, despite a turn towards constructive rules, parliamentary selectoral power remains limited and many parliamentary democracies have a confidence relationship tipped in favour of cabinet. The practical consequence of this ‘constructive’ turn in the confidence relationship appears to be a shift from emphasizing ex post accountability to delegation and from confidence/accountability to parliament’s tolerance of government for the duration of the parliamentary term.