Unsuccessful Success? Failed No-Confidence Motions, Competence Signals, and Electoral Support

Abstract

If no-confidence motions are primarily motivated by bringing down governments, why do only approximately 5% of no-confidence motions in advanced parliamentary democracies from 1960 result in the termination of government? In this project the author addresses this puzzle by developing a formal model of the electoral benefits of no-confidence motions and tests these hypotheses with the use of an original data set. No-confidence motions represent highly visible opportunities for opposition parties to highlight their strength or ability compared to the government in the hopes of improving their vote shares. The author finds support for the signal-based theory on a sample of 20 advanced parliamentary democracies from 1960 to 2008. Although no-confidence motions result in decreases for the government parties, the opposition parties that propose the motion experience boosts in vote share. This relationship is even stronger when the proposing party is an alternative governing possibility—illustrated by the conditioning impacts of the number of parliamentary parties and the opposition party’s ideological extremism. This provides an explanation as to why opposition parties would continue to challenge the government even though the motions are likely to fail.

Government Selection and Executive Powers: Constitutional Design in Parliamentary Democracies

“…The most important mechanism available to parliament is, of course, the very institution that defines a system as parliamentary: the vote of no confidence, through which parliament can remove the government from office (Williams 2011). Recent work has also explored other mechanisms through which parliaments -or the parties that constitute a majority in a parliamentcan keep tabs on the actions of the government as a way to ultimately punish deviations from their preferences (Müller and Meyer 2010).…”

Dissolution Threats and Legislative Bargaining

“…We specifically examine threats of dissolution rather than generic threats of termination. There is also research on no‐confidence motions by opposition parties (e.g., Williams ).…”

Opposition Parties and the Timing of Successful No-Confidence Motions

“…I code three mutually exclusive outcomes (SQ, Fail, and Pass) based on whether an NCM occurs in that month, and whether that NCM was successful. So that the conclusions of this paper are directly comparable, I use Williams (2011) as the source of the data on the timing and outcomes of NCMs, which uses a combination of parliamentary archives and secondary sources (e.g., wire reports, newspaper articles, and Keesing's World Archives). 7 Table 1 provides the number of Fail and Pass outcomes for each sample state.…”

“…In fact, in a sample of 19 parliamentary democracies from the late-1950s-2006 I find that only about 4.3 percent of NCMs are passed by parliament. This low success rate is not surprising, however, when one considers that a secondary motivation of opposition parties is to propose NCMs to improve their electoral prospects (Williams 2011;Williams 2014). The NCMs act as signals of the opposition party's abilities to govern vis-à-vis the current government, which voters use when deciding which party to support.…”