Investiture and Removal of Governments: ‘Positive’ and ‘Negative’ Parliamentarism

The distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ parliamentarism, introduced by Bergman, has gained a wide use in the analysis of parliamentary politics and government formation. It is often used simply as a dummy variable, without much consideration of the features of government investiture rules in various countries. This chapter argues that we need to move beyond the dichotomy of positive and negative parliamentarism. In addition, we should contrast investiture rules with removal rules. An analysis of investiture and removal voting rules in 29 European democracies shows that most countries balance their investiture and removal rules. Most countries where governments face high thresholds for investiture, also make government removal relatively difficult. Conversely, in many of the countries without investiture votes, government removal requires only a relative majority of votes in parliament. The analysis of shows that investiture and removal rules are distinctive forms of parliamentary power that are best analysed as ordinal scales instead of dichotomies in order to understand their precise impact on governance and parliamentary politics.