Prime ministers, the vote of confidence and the management of coalition terminations between elections

Abstract

When coalition leaders have powers to call a vote of confidence, they can invoke the threat of government resignation or early elections, and raise other actors’ costs of voting down the government. In this paper, this insight is applied to coalition replacements. The procedure, argued here, allows leaders to reduce their risk of losing office between elections by (i) managing the coalition’s cohesion and (ii) denying parliament the option of replacing the government without intervening elections. Premiers, moreover, can be expected to use these powers for partisan benefit, protecting primarily their own rather than their coalition partners’ incumbency status. To test this expectation, a novel measure of vote of confidence powers is applied to the analysis of coalition replacement risks in 20 European democracies. The results show that premiers with extensive confidence powers significantly reduce their risk of replacement between elections while their coalition partners do not benefit equally.