The Confidence Relations between the Legislature and the Executive in Parliamentary Democracies

In parliamentary democracies, the executive emerges from and is responsible to the legislature, expressed through votes of investiture, confidence, and no confidence. While the existing literature acknowledges that these three votes create the confidence relations between the legislature and the executive, the conceptual definition of these relations, the institutional rules of each of the three votes, and the dynamics created by their different formations in parliamentary democracies are still underdeveloped. This paper defines and examines the three confidence votes and proposes a new integrated framework for the confidence relations between parliaments and governments. It also operationalizes the three confidence votes in one holistic delineation of the confidence relations. It then codes the three confidence votes in 30 parliamentary democracies and assesses if these procedures are institutionally connected. Finally, it tests the new integrated framework by empirically assessing the effect of the three confidence votes on government duration across parliamentary democracies and asses their combined effect. Our results show that the institutional correlations of our proposed measures are weak, but there is a significant correlation in the majority requirements among the votes, suggesting some institutional interconnectedness. In addition, while the interaction models reveal a slightly stronger influence on government duration than individual votes, the overall impact of this integrated framework on government duration is modest.