Brexit in chaos as Tory MPs trigger vote of no confidence in May

[nitpicker]

6. More from Wikipedia

In modern times, passage of a motion of no confidence is a relatively rare event in two-party democracies. In almost all cases, party discipline is sufficient to allow a majority party to defeat a motion of no confidence, and if faced with possible defections in the government party, the government is likely to change its policies rather than lose a vote of no confidence. The cases in which a motion of no confidence has passed are generally those in which the government party's slim majority has been eliminated by either by-elections or defections, such as the 1979 vote of no confidence in the Callaghan ministry in the UK which was carried by one vote, forcing a general election which was won by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party.

Motions of no confidence are far more common in multi-party systems in which a minority party must form a coalition government. This can mean that there have been many short-lived governments because the party structure allows small parties to defeat a government without means[clarification needed] to create a government. This has widely been regarded as the cause of instability for the French Fourth Republic and the German Weimar Republic. More recent examples have been in Italy between the 1950s and 1990s, Israel, and Japan.