Government formation and breakdown in Western and Central Eastern Europe

Abstract

In this paper, we use a new dataset describing governments, political parties and institutions to make an explicit comparison between Western and Central Eastern Europe (CEE) in the investigation of three different topical issues found in the coalition literature, namely coalition formation (i.e. which factors affect who forms the winning coalitions), the number of cabinet members (i.e. what affects the number of ministers in a cabinet) and cabinet duration (i.e. which factors affect how long a new government lasts). Our findings indicate that, regardless of all the discussions about how Central Eastern Europe is different from Western Europe ¬¬because of the post-communist heritage or the volatility of voters in the CEE region, structural attributes such as the size and number of political parties are important determinants of coalition formation and cabinet duration patterns in both the West and the East. In fact, precisely because of the unsettled nature of CEE party politics, structural attributes tend to matter even more in the East.

How is Government Stability Affected by the State of the Economy? Payoff Structures, Government Type and Economic State

“…To investigate the connection between macroeconomic conditions and cabinet stability, our main source of data is the European Representative Democracy Data Archive (ERDDA), which contains data on parties, governments and institutions for 29 European democracies between 1945 and 2013 (Andersson et al 2014). 2 However, we did not use the information on all countries included in the data set, because governments in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) tend to end for slightly different reasons than those in Western Europe (Bergman et al 2015). 3 Also, the data for CEE countries is from 1990 onwards whereas the data on the Western European countries goes back to 1945.…”

Investiture rules and formation of minority governments in European parliamentary democracies

“…We briefly discuss each of these dimensions and then turn our attention to the differences in the decision rule required to 2 The approach in cross-country analyses is to employ a dummy variable indicating the presence or absence of an investiture vote (not counting the cases in which investiture is obtained with the support of a negative majority). Examples of work that use the "investiture dummy" include De Winter (1995), Diermeier and van Roozendaal (1998), Diermeier and Stevenson (1999), Martin and Stevenson (2001), Mattila and Raunio (2004), Bäck and Dumont (2008), De Winter and Dumont (2008), Conrad and Golder (2010), Glasgow, Golder, andGolder (2011), andHellström (2015). invest a government.…”

“…Understanding which parties coalesce and the form of the government remains the subject of significant scholarly inquiry. One important avenue of research has explored the role of political institutions and rules, including the formal role of parliament in determining whether a majority or minority government will form (see, for example, Bergman (1993), Bergman, Ersson, and Hellström (2015), Conrad and Golder (2010), Diermeier, Eraslan, and Merlo (2002), Eppner and Ganghof (2017), Müller and Strøm (2000), Rasch, Martin, and Cheibub (2015a), Sieberer (2011), Strøm (1990), Strøm and McClean (2018), and Tsebelis and Ha (2014). A minority government (or minority cabinet) is one where the parties holding ministerial portfolios do not control a majority of seats in the legislature.…”

New parties, information uncertainty, and government formation: evidence from Central and Eastern Europe

“…However, the region-specific literature has not systematically investigated this issue. While several studies have analyzed new parties in CEE at the electoral and parliamentary levels (Sikk, 2005, 2012; Tavits, 2007), executive-related research has focused on other features, such as the regime divide between communist successor parties (CSPs) and former opposition forces (Grzymala-Busse, 2001; Druckman and Roberts, 2007) or standard variables adopted from Western European coalition studies (Döring and Hellström, 2013; Savage, 2014; Bergman et al ., forthcoming).…”