Votes of confidence/investiture as conditions for formation of minority governments in the European Parliamentary Democracies: a statistical cut.

Abstract

Political theory and practice show that parliamentary democracies, including in Europe, independently or almost independently of the forms and systems of government that they are implementing, are divided into systems of positive and negative parliamentarism. An indicator of the dichotomy is presence (constitutionally provided) or absence (constitutionally unprovided) of the vote of confidence/investiture in expected/hypothetical government. It actualizes the issue of the influence of vote of confidence/investiture on the formation of minority governments (and other types of governments) in the European parliamentary democracies. Accordingly, the article is dedicated to analyzing the institute of vote of confidence/investiture and statistical outlining its impact on the formation of minority government in European parliamentary democracies. It is argued that the presence or absence of votes of confidence/investiture and their combinations and procedural patterns affect the frequency of formation of minority governments in different ways. Among such patterns there are the following: participation or non-participation of parliament in the procedure of vote of confidence/investiture and formation of government (presence or absence of vote of investiture); type of parliamentary vote of confidence/investiture («ex ante» or «ex post»); the rule of deciding on a parliamentary vote of confidence/investiture in a government (by absolute, relative or negative parliamentary majority); permissible number of formateurs or alternatives of governments for parliamentary vote of investiture; the right to nominate prime ministers/formateurs or alternatives of governments; the number of attempts to obtain a parliamentary vote of confidence/investiture; consequence of the failure to get vote of confidence/investiture. As a consequence, checking the correlation between the various patterns of votes of investiture and the frequency of formation of minority governments generally shows that the institutional design of votes investiture mostly and averaging does not affect the frequency of formation of minority governments, although some patterns of votes of investiture are decisive.