Confidence Game: How the Rules of the Confidence Relationship Impact Accountability and Executive- Legislative Relations in Parliamentary Democracies

The confidence connection linking cabinets to parliaments is the defining feature of parliamentary democracies. Citizens elect a parliament, parliament delegates to cabinet through an investiture vote, and cabinet retains office so long as it holds the confidence of parliament. If confidence is lost through a vote of confidence or non-confidence, the cabinet is expected to resign, opening the door to a new government or an early dissolution and election. Yet, evidence from a sample of 28 established parliamentary democracies suggests parliament has a limited capacity to carry out these functions. This is driven in part by growing democratic sensibilities and the electoral theory of democracy, that demand citizens ‘select’ the government, giving it a democratic mandate to govern, and hold it accountable at the next election. Existing research into the confidence connection is both limited and compartmentalized. It is limited because events that pull back the curtain on the confidence connection are infrequent – especially non-confidence votes with a reasonable chance of defeating the government. Compartmentalization results from the focus in the comparative literature on the individual mechanisms that parliaments use to delegate to cabinet and hold it accountable. Consequently, comparative studies isolate investiture votes, confidence votes, non-confidence votes, and dissolution rules from each other, overlooking how the rules for each mechanism were designed to work together. This project develops the confidence relationship to unite the four delegation and accountability mechanisms, plus the relevant constitutional and procedural rules, that establish the rules of the game between executives and legislatures. It then operationalizes the confidence relationship as the Parliamentary Selectoral Power Index (PSPI) to capture the relative balance of selectoral power over the confidence relationship. I find that parliamentary democracies have, despite the wide variety of rules, adopted confidence relationships that generally privilege the executive relative to parliament and cluster around the mean PSPI score. This becomes more pronounced as countries have turned towards more constructive rules that, in theory, give more power to parliament over the executive, but in practice make it more difficult for parliament to act and ultimately shift power away from parliament to a direct relationship between the executive and electorate.

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