Abstract

This chapter explores the role of national legislatures in government formation. The specific focus is on explaining variation in what we term parliamentary investiture. We start our analysis by discussing variation in the design of investiture procedures. To understand better the constitution-making origin of investiture, we then focus on three cases of constitutional design and investiture – France, Ireland, and Romania. We complement these cases with a cross-country analysis of constitutional process and investiture rules. We find evidence that the nature of the constitution-making process impacts the formation rules enshrined in a country’s constitution – executive-dominated constitution-making processes tend to result in weaker investiture rules whereas legislative-dominated processes tend to result in stronger investiture processes.