Investiture Rules and Formation of Minority Governments in European Parliamentary Democracies

In parliamentary systems, political parties must often bargain with each other in order to form a government. Do parliamentary rules regulating government formation impact the type of government that is formed? Existing scholarship suggests that the need for an investiture vote - a requirement that a new government must face a parliamentary vote at some point during its formation - reduces the likelihood of a minority government. This paper suggests that while real–world investiture rules can vary across several dimensions, only the investiture decision rule—which specifies the size of the majority required for a decision to be made—impacts the propensity for parties to form minority governments. Using new data on investiture rules for 26 European countries since 1946 or the first year of democracy, we find that parliamentary democracies that have an investiture requirement are not less likely to experience minority governments than those where governments come to power without an investiture vote. However, when an absolute majority is required for a government to succeed at the investiture stage, minority governments are considerably less likely to form; absolute majority investiture rules reduce the frequency of minority governments

Irans islamske styreform i en demokratiserende verden

I den islamske verden har demokratiske styreformer til nå hatt dårlige vekstvilkår. Situasjonen er likevel ikke helt uten lyspunkter. Det er særlig i ikke-arabiske land med muslimsk befolkning at demokratiske eksperimenter er i ferd med å ta form, eksperimenter som kan vise seg å bli svært viktige

Mindretallsregjeringer, investitur og mistillitsordninger i europeisk perspektiv

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Constitutional parliamentarism in Europe, 1800-2019

This paper analyses the institutions associated with government termination in parliamentary systems: no-confidence and confidence motions, and the early dissolution of the parliament. We consider constitutional texts for all European countries between 1800 and 2019 and identify two broad trends: (1) the constitutionalisation of practices that have first emerged as the result of strategic interactions between the government and the parliament; (2) the tendency towards protecting both the executive and the parliament from mutual interference. While the first tendency has culminated with an almost universal constitutionalisation of the principle of parliamentarism in European constitutions, the second led to the protection of executives and the extension of effective legislative terms. We suggest that these constitutional developments are associated with the stabilisation of parliamentarism after World War II and conclude that although parliamentarism remains a flexible system, contemporary regimes do not function like their forebears did in the 19th century

Termination of parliamentary governments: revised definitions and implications

The literature on government coalitions uses a common definition of when governments terminate and new ones form. This terminology is convenient and has served empirical coalitions studies quite well. This article challenges this terminology on the ground that it risks inflating the number of governments and, at least in some countries, severely distorts scholarly understanding of government duration and durability. Specifically, this article criticises the definitional condition that any partisan change in the composition of a government signifies its termination. The article demonstrates how using more precise definitions affects government duration considerably in a number of countries. In some cases, countries experience short-lived governments because minor partisan changes take place within a surplus coalition. Given these observations, the article re-visits the finding that minimum winning governments survive longer than oversized governments. When applying the modified definitions, differences in duration between these two types of majority coalitions almost disappear