The vote of confidence and executive bargaining power

The vote of confidence procedure in parliamentary democracies is consequential because it enables executive leaders to raise the stakes in negotiating with parliament by threatening government resignation or early elections. However, existing scholarship has not systematically conceptualised the considerable variation in vote of confidence rules and measured the bargaining power that derives from them. We address this gap by conceptualising, operationalising, and testing an index that measures the executive bargaining power generated by vote of confidence rules in 25 parliamentary democracies. We demonstrate the substantive utility of the index by applying it to the fulfilment of parties’ election promises and show that leaders’ confidence powers can increase their party’s success by up to 20%. This result illustrates the advances that the index makes possible in rendering many empirical predictions of legislative bargaining models tractable for the first time.