Legislative confidence is the core feature of parliamentarism. No government can survive against the will of parliament. The instrument by which parliament can express its support, or lack thereof, is the vote of no-confidence. The vote of no-confidence is thus the institutional mechanism by which parliamentary democracy is fulfilled.
In established parliamentary democracies, no-confidence votes are rare. Instead, parliamentary systems operate on the potential of, and anticipation for, a vote of no-confidence. The specific mechanism that exists for the removal of the government will influence executive-legislative relations in general and the dynamics between the government and the opposition in particular. Comparative studies of parliamentarism have devoted some attention to the details of the institutions that regulate the relationship between the government and the opposition, but the study of the no-confidence mechanism has received very little conceptual or empirical attention by scholars, with hardly any focusing on the constructive variant. Moreover, the opposition continues to suffer from a dearth of analytical and systemic research.
The subject of this paper is, therefore, the effect of the no-confidence mechanism on the behavior of parliamentary opposition parties. The paper conceptualizes this effect by assessing three different aspects of government-opposition relations. First, we delineate how varying degrees of restrictiveness of the vote of no-confidence affect its use in attempts to topple the government, and the, and the opposition’s role in such attempts. Second, we assess how restrictions on the no-confidence mechanism impact the way and extent to which the opposition may use the mechanism for electoral purposes. Third, we discuss how the relations between the opposition and government in daily parliamentary activities are affected by the no-confidence mechanism. Finally, we end by presenting several empirical analyses confirming our theoretical arguments and suggest ways to push the research further.
