Congrats to Elsa Piersig on her recent PhD dissertation defence. Her thesis is titled Confidence Game: How the Rules of the Confidence Relationship Impact Accountability and Executive-Legislative Relations in Parliamentary Democracies and her supervisor was Jonathan Malloy. We would also like to congratulate Elsa on her appointment as Assistant Professor in Political Science at Lakehead University!
About Elsa’s research:
The confidence connection linking cabinets to parliaments is the defining feature of parliamentary democracies. Citizens elect a parliament, parliament delegates to cabinet through an investiture vote, and cabinet retains office so long as it retains parliament’s confidence. Confidence is lost through a vote of confidence or non-confidence, opening the door to a new government or an early dissolution and election. Despite the central role of the confidence connection to parliamentary democracy, existing research is limited and targets each of these mechanisms separately.
Elsa’s research brings together the four delegation and accountability mechanisms, plus the relevant constitutional and procedural rules, of the confidence connection to measure the relative balance of power between cabinets and parliaments. Drawing on a sample of 28 established parliamentary democracies, the project finds that parliamentary democracies have tended to adopt confidence relationships that, despite the wide variety of rules, generally privilege the executive relative to parliament. This is more pronounced as countries have turned towards more constructive rules that, in theory, give parliament more power over the executive, but in practice make it more difficult for parliament to act. Greater constructiveness ultimately shifts power away from parliament to a direct relationship between the executive and electorate.