The Importance of Concurrence: The Impact of Bicameralism on Government Formation and Duration

Abstract

Recent research on parliamentary government demonstrates that institutions play a critical role in determining which governments form and how long governments endure. For example, investiture requirements, the head of state’s powers, and legislative decision rules all affect cabinet formation. Surprisingly, virtually no work has explored the impact of bicameralism on coalitional politics, despite a burgeoning interest in the study of bicameral legislatures. This may be the case because the cabinet’s survival almost never depends on formal upper chamber approval. However, Hammond and Miller (1987), Tsebelis and Money (1997), Heller (1997, 2001), and others have demonstrated that bicameralism fundamentally shapes policy outcomes. One implication of this finding is that coalition builders in bicameral systems will be induced to obtain concurrent majorities in both chambers, to ensure that government policies pass into law. Another is that governments with upper chamber majority support should survive longer than those without, other things equal. In this paper, we examine data from 202 governments in ten European countries. We find little evidence of bicameral effects on government formation, but strong support for the duration hypothesis – governments with upper chamber majorities last substantially longer than those without. Further, we show that this result holds even in the face of variation in the constitutional powers, and ideological and partisan compositions of upper chambers. The implication is that work on parliamentary government can no longer ignore the larger institutional context of bicameralism.