Cabinet Duration Research Articles

Duration of Party Control in Parliamentary and Presidential Governments

Most of the previous work on political stability uses cabinet duration or leadership duration to measure stability. This study, however, focuses on another area of stability, namely the party control of the executive branch. This approach not only allows us to compare political durability in presidential and parliamentary systems directly, but it also, we believe, better reflects policy changes that stem from government party composition. Our analysis of longitudinal data from 65 democracies reveals that presidential and parliamentary governments create different patterns of government survival. Ruling parties in parliamentary systems encounter a declining hazard rate over time, whereas those in presidentialism face an increasing hazard rate in their survival. We explain this difference by focusing on how parliamentary and presidential systems create different incentive structures for political parties.

Cabinet Instability and the Accumulation of Experience: The French Fourth and Fifth Republics in Comparative Perspective

Drawing on arguments about politics during the French Fourth Republic, the concept of cabinet instability is reconsidered. Rather than studying cabinet duration, the article examines the accumulation of experience by individual cabinet ministers. Two variables are measured in nineteen parliamentary democracies: portfolio experience the experience of cabinet ministers in the specific portfolios that they hold) and political experience (the experience of cabinet ministers in any significant portfolio). The results cast doubt on existing claims about cabinet government in the Fourth and Fifth Republics. They also uncover substantial cabinet turnover in majoritarian systems, suggesting that existing claims about stability in such systems may be overstated.

New Evidence on the Politics and Economics of Multiparty Cabinets Duration

A Proportional Hazards Specification for cabinet duration data is estimated by mean of a flexible parametric approach. The hazard rate is found to be significantly affected by the majority status, the degree of fragmentation and ideological homogeneity of the coalition, the stability and the polarisation of the legislature and the time horizon at the moment of cabinet formation. Interesting innovative results concern the higher stability of cabinets supported by coalitions ideologically closer to the median party and/or left–oriented. The overall state of the economy also has a role. Graphical evidence suggests that the underlying distribution of duration data might be a Gompertz distribution.

The cost of ruling, cabinet duration, and the "median-gap" model

In a recent article Paldam and Skott (1995) provide atheoretical explanation for an important empirical phenomenonin democratic countries: incumbent governments tend to losevotes. In this paper, I show that Paldam and Skott'stheoretical explanation for this ``cost of ruling'' ispotentially much stronger than they recognize. Specifically,when generalized in a straightforward way, their modelexplains not only the cost of ruling itself, but also a secondwell established empirical fact: that the longer an incumbentgovernment has been in power, the more votes it loses.Further, this generalization of the model produces twoadditional empirical hypotheses that have not yet been testedin the empirical literature.

Assessing Stability in New Zealand’s First Era of Multiparty Politics, 1911-1935

The phase of multiparty politics from 1911-1935 provides an opportunity to apply modern political science techniques for the study of party competition to an important period of New Zealand’s history. This article initially seeks to reconcile the three-partyformat with the workings of the simple plurality or ‘first-past-the-post’ (FPP) electoral system. Although normally associated with the maintenance of two-party systems, for the period under study the reductive effect of FPP on the number of parties was mitigated by the spatial pattern of support for the Liberal, Reform and Labour parties. The focus of the article then shifts in an attempt to determine whether the persistence of multiparty parliaments during this period led to unstable government. The initial findings are derived by measuring cabinet duration and identifying the modes of termination, but their value is limited due to the operational difficulties inherent in matching detached analysis to the political reality of the time. As with the investigation into the effects of the electoral system on the party system, a wider range of variables (which are more difficult to measure) need to be canvassed to provide a more balanced assessment of governmental stability in this period.

Understanding Government Survival: Empirical Exploration or Analytical Models?

We should begin our reply to Paul Warwick by stating how very flattered we are by the diligent attention that he has given to our work on government formation. In particular, we are delighted that he has taken up and applied the simulation technology that we suggested as a way to explore cabinet stability, a matter on which we were beginning to feel like voices wailing in the wilderness.This is not the place to bore readers of the Journal with detailed points of issue between us, of which there are obviously many. We want here to concentrate upon some larger issues provoked by Warwick's critique. These involve a debate on cabinet stability and duration between a school of thought, in Warwick's corner, that is essentially empiricist in its outlook and a school of thought, in ours, that takes analytical modelling as being more fundamental. This is a theme touched upon by Kaare Strom in his recent review essay on parliamentary democracy.

Beyond Linearity by Default: Generalized Additive Models

Social scientists almost always use statistical models positing the dependent variable as a global, linear function of X, despite suspicions that the social and political world is not so simple, or that our theories are so strong. Generalized additive models (GAMs) let researchers fit each independent variable with arbitrary nonparametric functions, but subject to the constraint that the nonparametric effects combine additively. In this way GAMs strike a sensible balance between the flexibility of nonparametric techniques and the ease of interpretation and familiarity of linear regression. GAMs thus offer social scientists a practical methodology for improving on the extant practice of global linearity by default. We reanalyze published work from several subfields of political science, highlighting the strengths (and limitations) of GAMs. We estimate non-linear marginal effects in a regression analysis of incumbent reelection, nonparametric duration dependence in an analysis of cabinet duration, and within-dyad interaction effects in a reconsideration of the democratic peace hypothesis. We conclude with a more general consideration of the circumstances in which GAMs are likely to be of use to political scientists, as well as some apparent limitations of the technique.

Party Factionalism and Cabinet Durability

Most studies of coalition behavior have treated political parties as unitary actors. Building on extant literature, this paper relaxes the unitary actor assumption in order to develop a theory about the impact of party factionalism on cabinet duration. Specifically, cabinets composed of factionalized parties are expected to exhibit less stability. Cross-national data corroborate the hypothesis, demonstrating the importance of intra-party characteristics in determining coalition behavior.

The Cabinet Stability Controversy: New Perspectives on a Classic Problem

Empirical research into cabinet stability or duration has bifurcated into two contending streams: the approach, which explains duration with attributes or causal factors, and the events approach, which models the phenomenon as a process of random cabinet collapses. Recently, a unified model has been proposed that uses maximum likelihood estimation to combine the two. In this article we demonstrate that the cabinet duration phenomenon is more complex than the unified model allows for, and we develop an alternative research strategy and model.

A Unified Model of Cabinet Dissolution in Parliamentary Democracies

The literature on cabinet duration is split between two apparently irreconcilable positions. The attributes theorists seek to explain cabinet duration as a fixed function of measured explanatory variables, while the events process theorists model cabinet durations as a product of purely stochastic processes. In this paper we build a unified statistical model that combines the insights of these previously distinct approaches. We also generalize this unified model, and all previous models, by including (1) a stochastic component that takes into account the censoring that occurs as a result of governments lasting to the vicinity of the maximum constitutional interelection period, (2) a systematic component that precludes the possibility of negative duration predictions, and (3) a much more objective and parsimonious list of explanatory variables, the explanatory power of which would not be improved by including a list of indicator variables for individual countries.

The Comparative Analysis of Coalition Formation and Duration: Distinguishing Between-Country and Within-Country Effect

Dodd is generally credited with providing clear empirical support for the proposition that, in the period after the Second World War, minimal winning coalitions in European party governments will tend to last longer in office than non-minimal winning coalitions. There has been a considerable body of research on this and related questions. Dodd, as well as most other authors treating cabinet coalition formation, has attempted to model features of cabinet formation such as cabinet duration or cabinet type (e.g. minimal winning v. minority government v. oversized coalitions) largely or entirely using data pooled from all cabinets in each of a number of different countries over some considerable time period. One difficulty with this method is that system-level variables (such as number of parties, or the presence of large anti-system parties), which might be able to explain aggregate-level between-county variations in cabinet type or cabinet durability, are not likely to be the same variables that are useful in explaining within-country differences. A second difficulty is that certain system-level characteristics such as effective number of parties or number of cleavage dimensions are highly correlated with both cabinet type and cabinet duration and, as a consequence, these variables are highly correlated with one another when pooled cross-national data are used. Thus, if the analyst is not very careful, results of pooled cross-national data may lead to mistakes about causal structure and a confusion of within-country and between-country effects.

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

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