One of the most important notions of democratic representation is that voters hold their elected officials accountable. In parliamentary democracies, beyond ongoing executive oversight, no-confidence motions are the main and most extreme tool given to the legislature to hold the executive accountable. However, despite the large literature devoted to parliamentary government and the importance of this mechanism, there is little academic research devoted to it.
In order to help correct this lacuna in legislative studies and enable scholars to conduct cross-national research on the subject of parliaments and government termination, no-confidence votes must be conceptualized and their study needs to be systematically formulated. The aim of this paper is to offer a conceptual framework for analyzing no-confidence mechanisms, to supply the analytical criteria for cross-national research, and to delineate several country cases in order to substantiate the proposed framework.
The first section of the proposed paper will present a reevaluation of the different types of no-confidence votes. The paper will then suggest a series of criteria to evaluate parliaments and government termination based on the vote of no-confidence, i.e., on the relative ease with which a government may be challenged by parliament. The following section will present a spectrum, based on these criteria, which will uncover the balance of power between the legislative and the executive branches. The paper will attempt to confirm that the criteria on which the spectrum is based are correct by then empirically placing countries on the spectrum. Finally, we will examine how (and possibly why) countries move along the spectrum.
In short, this proposed paper will delineate a framework for analysis of parliaments and government termination, producing a spectrum that we will empirically validate, while arguing that the vote of no-confidence is much more than a final stage in the life cycle of parliamentary democracy.
