Dissolution power, confidence votes, and policymaking in parliamentary democracies
| Author | Michael Becher |
| Published date | 01 April 2019 |
| Date | 01 April 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0951629819833182 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2019, Vol.31(2) 183–208
ÓThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629819833182
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Dissolution power,
confidence votes, and
policymaking in
parliamentary democracies
Michael Becher
IASTand UT1, France
Abstract
There is striking variation across parliamentary democracies in the power of prime ministers to
employ two prominent procedures to resolve legislative conflict: the vote of confidence and the
dissolution of parliament. Whereas previous contributions in comparative politics have investi-
gated each of these two fundamental institutions in isolation, I develop a simple unified model to
unbundle how this richer varietyof institutional configurations shapes political bargainingover pol-
icy. The analysis clarifies that the effects of the confidence vote and dissolutionpower interact. As
a consequence, there can be a non-monotonic effect of increasing prime ministers’ formal power
on their ability to shape the policy compromise. Counterintuitively,introducing dissolution power
makes the prime minister worse off undersome conditions. These results suggest new directions
for empirical research on the consequences of parliamentary institutionsfor legislative politics and
policy. Theyalso lay analytical foundations for explaining institutionalvariation and reforms.
Keywords
comparative politics; confidence vote; dissolution power; legislativebargaining; political institu-
tions; prime minister
In the large universe of parliamentary democracies there exists striking variation in
the power of the chief executive responsible to parliament, henceforth simply
referred to as the prime minister (PM), to employ two prominent institutional
Corresponding author:
Michael Becher, Institute for Advanced Study inToulouse and UniversityToulouse 1 Capitole, 21 alle
´ede
Brienne, 31015 Toulouse Cedex 6, France.
Email: michael.becher@iast.fr
procedures to resolve legislative conflict: the vote of confidence and the dissolution
of parliament. Table 1 lists the institutional variety based on data for 20 countries.
First, there are democracies where the PM has the formal power to unilaterally use
the confidence vote on a particular policy proposal but lacks the power to indepen-
dently dissolve the legislature and call a new election (e.g., France, Germany,
Norway). A confidence vote fuses the vote on a government bill with a vote on the
survival of the government. If a majority votes against the policy, the government
has to resign and a new government is formed from the sitting legislature unless
there is a new election. A failed confidence vote does not automatically lead to a
new election. In this group of countries, this requires the consent of at least a parti-
san head of state or is ruled out altogether. Second, there is a group of democracies
where the PM may both call a confidence vote and dissolve the legislature, unilat-
erally or with the consent of a non-partisan head of state (e.g., Canada, Denmark,
Spain). Finally, in some cases the PM may neither call a confidence vote nor dis-
solve the legislature without the consent of at least another partisan actor, such as
a coalition partner in the cabinet or the head of state (e.g., Austria, Italy, the
Netherlands). There is no clear case where the PM has unilateral dissolution power
but no control over the confidence vote.
1
How do these differences in fundamental executive-legislative institutions influ-
ence political bargaining and policy outcomes? Are there interactions between the
two dimensions of executive power? Is more formal power always better for the
PM? Previous theoretical contributions in comparative politics do not provide a
clear answer to these questions because they have investigated each of these two
institutions, confidence votes (e.g., Diermeier and Feddersen, 1998; Diermeier and
Vlaicu, 2011; Huber, 1996b; Huber and McCarty, 2001) and dissolution power
(e.g., Becher and Christiansen, 2015; Lupia and Strøm, 1995), in isolation. Whereas
this literature has yielded important insights about how PMs can employ confi-
dence votes or dissolution power to shape post-electoral bargaining that lies at the
core of parliamentary governance, it does not allow us to theoretically map out the
institutional space captured by Table 1. The existing theoretical approaches rule
out by assumption the possibility that the two institutions interact. In fact, a plausi-
ble interpretation of a pioneering model, discussed below, is that the two powers
are analytically equivalent. Given the state of the theory, it is perhaps also not sur-
prising that there has been little empirical work on whether the different institu-
tional configurations are related to patterns and outcomes of legislative politics.
The goal of this paper is to develop a simple theory that captures the striking
variation in the institutional power of PMs over confidence votes and parliamen-
tary dissolutions described above. To that end, I propose and analyze a two-period
formal model of a multi-party parliamentary system where political parties collec-
tively determine a programmatic policy in each period. This set-up allows for the
ceteris paribus comparison of equilibrium legislative behavior and policy under
alternative configurations of prime-ministerial power, thereby unbundling the
importance of dissolution power and the confidence vote.
Dissolution power and the confidence vote procedure both entail a difficult
inter-temporal trade-off for parties, especially members of the governing coalition.
184 Journal of Theoretical Politics 31(2)
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