The executive-initiated vote of confidence procedure enables the prime minister or cabinet to put the government’s survival at stake in negotiating with parliament, and is one of the most potent legislative prerogatives available to the executive in parliamentary democracies. Despite its importance, however, existing scholarship has paid scant attention to the task of systematically conceptualizing the tremendous variation in vote of confidence rules and measuring the bargaining power that derives from them. In this paper, we address this gap. We conceptualize the vote of confidence as a source of executive bargaining power and construct an index measuring it in 23 parliamentary democracies. We then demonstrate the utility of the index by applying it to a range of substantive outcomes. Our results suggest that the index opens up opportunities to develop a better understanding of legislative outcomes in multiple fields including government formation, cabinet termination, and the negotiation of public policy
