Investiture rules and the formation and type of government in Israel and Italy

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the seemingly puzzling situation in which legislators vote against a government of which they will become a part. Why are legislators from the coalition parties not fully disciplined in the investiture vote? Is it because of the type of government when the characteristics of the investiture vote is similar (a simple majority and an ex-post vote)? Using Israel and Italy as case studies, we demonstrate that when the type of government is an oversized coalition and the investiture consists of a simple majority and an ex-post vote (as a constant), legislators will be willing to vote against their party. We argue that they do so to express their disappointment with the positions they are offered and/or the policies that the coalition is adopting. Given the simple majority and oversized coalition, they are risking little and potentially reaping future rewards from their actions.

KEYWORDS:

• Investiture vote
• oversized coalition
• vote gap
• Israel
• Italy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Israel was established on 1948, hence the starting point for data collection.

2 http://www.parlgov.org/.

3 The number of cabinets ranges between 18 (Switzerland) and 43 (Belgium). However, Finland has had 53 cabinets, France 61 and Japan 55. We excluded these countries because they do not have the two forms of investiture votes that exist in Italy and Israel (simple majority and ex-post votes).

4 For more details see Russo (2015); Sasley and Waller (2017).

5 Since the establishment of Israel, there has been an ongoing debate about the question of a single nationwide constituency versus local geographic representation; see, for example, Latner and McGann (2005).

6 For more information about the evolution of the oversized coalition theory, see Niikawa (2018).

7 There are some possible intervening factors that could be part of the analysis, such as party size, party system fragmantation, and candidate selection methods. However, given that the data are at the aggregate level, they are not relevant for the analysis.

8 In Italy he or she is called the President of the Council of Ministers.

9 During the period of the direct election, the prime minister also had to appear before the Knesset and present the ministers, the division of tasks among them and the government policy. The ministerial appointments made by the (directly elected) prime minister required ex-post approval in the parliament. If the vote failed, the proposed government would be dissolved. Even though the Knesset vote was of an ex-post nature, the voters themselves had already (i.e., ex-ante) elected the prospective chief executive from several candidates for the office.

10 The data in Table 1 are based only on the ParlGov dataset. Hence, there are 29 cases of minority governments in Israel, while in the governments with investiture votes there is just one minority government. There is a discrepancy between Parlgov's data about the number of cabinets for each country, the type of government and the number of investiture votes that are legally mandatory to establish a new government. See more about this discrepancy in Akirav (2020).

11 An oversized coalition is a surplus majority government that includes one or more parties that are not crucial to its majority status.

12 According to the ParlGov dataset, minority governments are frequent in Israel. In contrast, according to the investiture votes we analyze, there is just one minority government on 11 June 1990.

13 See footnote 12.

14 This is the explanation for the gap between the number of cabinets in Table 2 and the number of investiture votes in the analysis.

15 However, it is important to note that this could be the result of opposition legislators voting in favor and being cancelled out by coalition legislators voting against.

16 We are looking at individual legislators’ disappointment, not party disappointment. We present an example of their disappointment with the coalition’s policy in Appendix 1. We looked at the floor protocols and tried to identify speeches of coalition legislators indicating their disappointment with the composition or policies of the coalition (Appendix 1, vote of 31.3.09).

17 For more details, see Appendix 1.

18 https://main.knesset.gov.il/Activity/plenum/pages/sessions.aspx.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Osnat Akirav

Osnat Akirav is an associate professor in Political Science and the head of the department of political science at the Western Galilee College. Her specialisation is in legislative studies and she has numerous publications on the representative behaviour in parliaments. In 2010 and 2015 she received a prize for outstanding teaching in political science from the APSA and in 2012 she received Edmond Safra award for outstanding achievement and excellence. In 2012 and 2016 she received a prize for best article from the IPSA. In 2015 and 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 she received a prize for excellent researcher from the WGC.