Resumen
How do cabinet reshuffles affect the parliamentary opposition’s use of no-confidence motions in the government? Opposition parties employ no-confidence motions as electoral signals to highlight government incompetence, and to position themselves as a government in waiting. We argue that cabinet reshuffles - by which prime ministers respond to policy failures, scandals, poor ministerial performance, and disloyalty - present an opportunity for the opposition to deploy no-confidence motions to this end. The incentives for this strategy, however, are contingent on the nature of the party system and are greatest where party system concentration positions a single opposition party as the alternative to the government and sole beneficiary of a no-confidence vote. We test this expectation using a multilevel modelling approach applied to data on reshuffles in 316 governments and sixteen parliamentary democracies, and find support for our expectation: Cabinet reshuffles raise the probability of no-confidence motions conditional on party system concentration.
Bastián González-Bustamante
Investigador Postdoctoral
Investigador postdoctoral en Ciencias Sociales Computacionales y docente de Gobernanza y Desarrollo en el Instituto de Administración Pública de la Facultad de Gobernanza y Asuntos Globales de la Universidad de Leiden, Países Bajos. Profesor de la Escuela de Administración Pública de la Universidad Diego Portales e Investigador Asociado en Training Data Lab, Chile.