Parliaments and Government Formation

Bjørn Erik Rasch is Professor of Political Science and Deputy Dean at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Oslo. His research is currently focused on legislative organization, parliamentarism, and constitutional amendment procedures. Rasch has written or edited eleven books, of which The Role of Governments in Legislative Agenda Setting (co-edited with George Tsebelis, 2011) is the latest one. He has published numerous articles in books and journals such as Public Choice , Legislative Studies Quarterly, Journal of Legislative Studies, and European Journal of Political Economy. Rasch was member of a Constitutional Commission appointed by the Norwegian Parliament in 2003 to review and modernize the Court of Impeachment and a committee who designed a new electoral system for the Sami Parliament in Northern Norway. Rasch is a member of The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Shane Martin is Reader in Comparative Politics at the University of Leicester. His research focuses on how electoral incentives shape representatives' preferences, the internal structures of legislatures, and executive oversight. Recent research by Martin has appeared in the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Legislative Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Legislative Studies, Political Studies, West European Politics, and Irish Political Studies. He is co-editor (with Kaare Strøm and Thomas Saalfeld) of The Oxford Handbook of Legislative Studies (2014). He was founding Co-Convenor of the ECPR Standing Group on Parliaments and was founding Co-Director of the European Summer School on Parliaments.

José Antonio Cheibub is Boeschenstein Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy and Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also Faculty Associate at the Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois. His research and teaching interests are in democratization, the emergence and effects of specific democratic institutions, and political economy. He is the author of Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and Democracy (Cambridge University Press 2007), the co-editor of the Democracy Sourcebook (MIT Press, 2003) and the co-author of Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2000). He has published in several edited volumes and in journals such as American Political Science Review, World Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Politics and Society.

Parliaments and Government Formation explores the role of national legislatures in shaping government formation in parliamentary regimes. Under parliamentarism, the government comes from, and remains responsible to, the national parliament. Yet, although legislatures and the politics of government formation are two of the most studied phenomenon in comparative politics, relatively little attention has focused on the degree to which parliamentary rules and procedures impact government formation. For instance, exactly what does 'come from parliament' mean in the context of government formation?

To answer this question, the volume seeks to 'unpack' the parliamentary investiture vote. Investiture consists of a vote in parliament to demonstrate that an already formed or about to be formed government has legislative support. The volume analyses investiture along six dimensions: (1) the number of chambers involved in government formation, (2) the exact topic of any investiture vote - for example whether the votes focuses on one or more of the prime ministership, the cabinet and/or the government's policy program, (3) the sequencing and timing of the vote in the overall game of government formation, (4) the decision rule - for example absolute majority, simple or some form of negative parliamentarism, (5) the number of rounds provided for, and (6) what happens in the event of a failure to invest a government. Each of the 16 case studies, written by leading scholars of legislative politics in their respective polities, seeks to describe the institutional rules and practices and analyse their origins and consequences. These case studies are supplemented with two comparative chapters.

This volume explores the role of national legislatures in shaping government formation in parliamentary regimes.