The defining feature of a parliamentary system is that the executive derives its legitimacy from its ability to retain the confidence of the legislature. The no-confidence vote (NCV) is the institutional device through which an elected parliament attempts to demonstrate it has no longer confidence in one or more members of the appointed government, including the Prime Minister. Despite scholars having long recognized the importance of NCVs as one of the core features of parliamentarism, research about its impact on legislative-executive relations is still limited both theoretically and empirically. As NCVs are rare and almost always unsuccessful in bringing down governments, scholars primarily focused on the electoral benefits of calling NCVs for opposition parties. In this paper, we focus on the consequences that a no confidence vote, regardless being successful, might have on governing parties. How government parties react to a failed NCV?We conjecture that unsuccessful NCVs might delay government termination: if unsuccessful NCVs result in shifting electoral support for opposition parties, as existing research shows, government parties should attempt to prevent opposition parties to take advantage of them. Such kind of reactions should vary in different settings as we expect differences among single party governments and coalition governments. Moreover, in those systems whereas NCVs may target individual ministers, such as Italy or the Netherlands, unsuccessful NCVs might affect government composition fostering cabinet reshuffles. We will test these hypothese sfocusing on Italy as a case study. After describing NCV procedures in the Italian parliamentary system,we will analyze the impact of NCVs on government tenure by focusing on Italian executives formed between 1946 and 2018.
