One important proposition about the distribution of coalition payoffs is found in W. A. Gamson's theory of coalition formation: “Any participant will expect others to demand from a coalition a share of the payoff proportional to the amount of resources which they contribute to a coalition.” This proposition is tested in a universe of cabinet coalitions existing in thirteen European democracies during the postwar period. Here, payoffs to partners are indicated by the percentage share of cabinet ministries received by parties for their percentage contribution of parliamentary seats/votes to the coalition.The proportionality proposition is shown to hold strongly. Disproportionality, however, is observed to occur in distributions at the extremities of party size—large parties tend to be proportionately underpaid and small parties overpaid, the larger or smaller they become. This effect, however, is most pronounced when the size of the coalition is small, and tends to reverse itself as the size of the coalition increases.

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This article seeks to develop the argument that existing theoretical work investigating cabinet stability in parliamentary democracies is in need of reorientation. In the first part, we offer an extended critique of historical and contemporary literature, focusing heavily on contributions from coalition theory and recent empirical research on situational determinants of cabinet longevity. Arguing that the various models associated with both these research traditions are likely to be misspecified, in the second section we offer the sketch of a preliminary model of cabinet stability based upon “events” arising in the political environment of cabinet actors and capable of bringing on the termination of their governments. Unlike earlier theoretical treatments, our “events” focus suggests that a major component of a successful model of cabinet stability should be stochastic. In the final section, we seek to demonstrate the versatility and efficacy of an “events” approach to cabinet stability by providing a research agenda for further investigation of the problem. Two such projects are described: one pertaining to inductively oriented work relating “events” to the dissolution of cabinets, and the other a discussion of the consequences of an “events” approach for the deductive modelling of cabinet formation and persistance over time.

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Plurality electoral systems with multi-member districts and single nontransferable votes (SNTV) allow parties to win multiple seats in district elections by nominating multiple candidates, but they also penalize a party's seat share if the number of candidates offered is 'too many' or 'too few'. Given an institutional incentive to nominate the 'correct' number of candidates, we seek to establish empirically that the nominating behaviour of parties in such systems results from a rational calculus of strategic choice. So we develop and test an empirical theory of rational nominating behaviour applied to Japanese district elections before the 1994 electoral reform. We establish, for all possible nominating strategies, the conditions on voting outcomes required for actors to maximize benefits in the context. The efficiency of actual strategy choices for maximizing benefits is found by comparing an observed outcome from voting (the distributed benefit) with the benefit that would be expected had the party chosen its 'best' alternative nominating strategy instead. Empirical testing indicates that Japanese parties discriminated between available nominating strategies and made choices that maximized benefits in the context, evidence that the nominating behaviour of parties in this test environment was based on rational calculation.The issue of whether the nominating behaviour of Japanese political elites may be considered rationality-based is informed in the literature by two methodological approaches that derive conclusions from the empirical detection of party nominating errors. The first of these, exemplified by the work of Cox and his collaborators, 4 seeks to establish a 'maximally demanding' analytic benchmark of error-free nominating behaviour against which actual Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) nominations are evaluated. 5 To determine whether an error has been committed, Cox and Niou 6 develop a calculation procedure that requires parties to nominate only the number of candidates that can win seats, conditional upon some empirically determined magnitude of votes cast for opposing candidates and an efficient ('equalized') split of the party vote among its own candidates. From these conditions, three types of nomination error are derived: 'overnomination', where more candidates than can win a seat are nominated, 'undernomination', where fewer candidates than could win seats are nominated, and a 'non-optimal vote split', where the behaviour of party voters prevents the victory of some party candidate(s) that otherwise would have won a seat. Empirical testing based on these criteria indicates that about one-third of the LDP's nominating decisions were made in error.While Cox and his collaborators make no explicit claim regarding rationality, their theoretical assumption that the nominating and voting behaviour of actors will be 'efficient' in maximizing the party share of parliamentary seats is, in fact, what is commonly considered an expectation of rational behaviour. Their observation of substantial LDP nominating ...