16:50 - 18:30
PS10
Room:
Room: Club D
Panel Session 10
Nils-Christian Bormann - Government Formation in Interwar Europe
Francesco Bromo - PM-Initiated Confidence Votes in Parliamentary Democracies
Katharine Aha - Diverse Yet Durable? Interethnic Coalitions and Government Stability
PM-Initiated Confidence Votes in Parliamentary Democracies
PS10-2
Presented by: Francesco Bromo
Francesco Bromo
Texas A&M University
Scholars have argued that prime ministers make use of confidence votes to harvest the policy and office rewards that this tool can yield. In invoking the confidence procedure, however, leaders willingly jeopardize their job. To avoid replacement, they need to secure unanimity within their cabinet before calling the vote and the support of the majority of legislators voting on the motion. This begs the following questions: under what circumstances will PMs be more (or less) likely to initiate a confidence vote and how do these circumstances affect the prospects of success of the vote? This puzzle is non-trivial because these votes have been traditionally used for salient and -at times- controversial matters. In this article, I investigate how institutional features that shape the onerousness of governing affect the prime minister’s choice to employ this device and the outcome of the vote. There are factors that can make it harder (or easier) for the PM to obtain consensus from her ministers as well as parliament. I identify these factors as: the size of the coalition and its degree of heterogeneity, the share of the coalition controlled by the head of government, the size of the opposition, and the cabinet’s minority status. By relying on a novel dataset of PMICVs events, I outline different instances of use of confidence votes initiated by PMs and I present an empirical study of the determinants of their usage and success, the first of its kind.