The Impact of the Confidence Relations on Government Formation in Parliamentary Democracies

The paper brings a neglected element of institutional design into the study of government formation in parliamentary democracies, showing that government types reflect not only systemic conditions and party preferences but also the institutional rules governing how governments are formed, sustained, and removed. The defining feature of parliamentary democracy is the dependence of the executive on the legislature, exercised through three procedures which together constitute the confidence relations, the vote of investiture, the vote of confidence, and the vote of no confidence. Their institutional design shapes the rules under which political actors bargain over government formation, along with survival and termination, yet research on government formation has rarely treated the three votes as a single institutional configuration. This paper asks whether and how the confidence relations affect the probability of forming different types of governments. Building on a parliament-centred measure of confidence rules, we distinguish four types of confidence relations (simple majorities, increased majorities, negative confidence, and constructive confidence) and code them over time across 19 parliamentary democracies. We link country-period observations of confidence relations types both to an estimation sample of 547 government formations and to the exhaustive set of potential governments each election makes feasible, and model government type as a discrete choice among feasible governments alongside a Bayesian multilevel multinomial model of realized cabinets, adjusting for party system fragmentation and period. Preliminary results show that what varies is which government forms, not how many command a majority. Minority coalitions are least likely where removing a government requires agreement on a replacement, and minimal winning coalitions are more likely both there and where investiture does not exist. Every decisive difference between the types falls in formations between elections rather than after them, where removal rules bind too.