The Process of Cabinet Dissolution: An Exponential Model of Duration and Stability in Western Democracies

Abstract

Contemporary research on cabinet stability has focused upon relating specific attributes of political actors and parliamentary settings with the duration of cabinets over time. Statistical testing, however, has failed to produce convincing evidence for explanations based on such deterministic models. Our contention is that such models are misspecified. They focus upon elapsed time in office as the surrogate measure for cabinet stability. We present an alternative model, the central element of which describes the dissolution of cabinets as determined by a stochastic process, specifically, a Poisson process. We tested this model with data describing cabinet dissolutions in twelve Western European democracies from 1945 to 1980. In the final section of the paper, we discuss the substantive and research implications of our findings. For many years, scholars have sought to discover why governments in Western parliamentary democracies frequently dissolve before the time constitutionally mandated for holding elections. Their research has typically been focused on ascertaining the durability of cabinets (particularly coalition cabinets) in parliamentary settings. In general, proposed explanations of this phenomenon have generated only limited empirical support. Several variables representing the size of coalitions and ideological diversity of both coalition cabinets and parliamentary systems have been shown to be only weakly related to the length of time cabinets survive. It shall be our contention in this research that the efforts, both theoretical and empirical, that have been expended on the government duration problem have assumed an overly deterministic, and consequently misspecified, model of cabinet duration. Simply, the research tradition has held that individual instances of cabinet duration can be predicted with accuracy. We shall hold, to the contrary, that the dissolution of cabinets (the event that establishes a cabinet's duration) is the result of a process that contains