Modelling Cabinet Durability and Termination

Abstract

In this article we will review the literature on cabinet durability and cabinet termination. 1 The fact that many cabinets in Western multi-party democracies do not serve out their full potential legal term in office has given rise to an important and growing body of research in political science. Cabinet durability is one of the three main features of cabinets, the others being cabinet party composition and allocation of portfolios. 2 Each is of theoretical interest in itself, , respectively. This research is sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) under grant PG 50-370. It was begun while Van Roozendaal was a visiting researcher at the School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine. We are indebted to the staff of the Word Processing Center, School of Social Sciences, UCI, for technical assistance and to Dorothy Green and Chau Tran for bibliographic help. The authors' names are in alphabetical order. 1 Our initial aim was to update the excellent review of cabinet durability done over a decade ago by Lawrence C. Dodd, 'The Study of Cabinet Durability: Introduction and Commentary ', Comparative Political Studies, 17 (1984), 155-62, which became badly out of date because of the considerable volume of recent empirical and theoretical work. Subsequent to the initial submission of this article, we discovered that Paul Warwick, Government Survival in Parliamentary Democracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), had provided a substantial review of this literature in the course of elaborating his own model of government survival. We have incorporated references to that work here. However, while we agree with much of what Warwick has written, our perspective on the extent of progress in understanding the determinants of cabinet termination and on what remains to be done and how best to proceed is rather different from his. 2 There is a voluminous literature attempting to predict the party composition of cabinets from the party breakdown in the legislature and other factors, such as the ideological propinquity of the various parties. An excellent recent review is Michael Laver and Norman Schofield, Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), which also contains important new theoretical contributions of their own. The literature on portfolio allocations had been relatively dormant since the work of Eric Browne and his colleagues, e.g., Eric C. Browne and Mark Franklin, '

Semi-Presidential Systems: Dual Executive And Mixed Authority Patterns

“…32 For reviews of this extensive literature, see Laver (1998), and Martin and Stevenson (2001). 33 As reviewed in Grofman and Van Roozendaal(1997), and Laver, 2003. 34 For example, Amorim Neto et al (2003; Cheibub et al(2004); Alema´n and Tsebelis (2005).…”

Parsimonious Model for Predicting Mean Cabinet Duration On the Basis of Electoral System

“…2 Grofman and van Roozendaal (1997) give an excellent overview of factors that have been discussed in cabinet durability and termination studies. 3 Causality may go in both directions.…”

Explaining the demise of the national–New Zealand first coalition

“…Following the most recent attempts at categorisation (King et al 1990;Warwick 1994;Grofman and van Roozendaal 1997), attributes may be grouped into three categories: (1) Cabinet; (2) party system; and (3) the institutional rules for government formation and termination.…”

“…Fractionalisation As noted above, several characteristics of the party system have been identified as contributors to the complexity of the bargaining environment, which in turn influences the stability of the equilibrium for parties in government (Laver and Schofield 1990;King et al 1990;Grofman and van Roozendaal 1997). One factor in this complexity is fractionalisation, an index that characterises the EXPLAINING THE DEMISE OF THE NATIONAL NZF COALITION 593 number and relative size of parties in parliament-the more fractionalised the legislature, the greater the number of potentially viable Cabinets.…”

“…Political scientists have employed several different theories to explain such variation in 'Cabinet durability', but it is now widely accepted that any adequate account requires a synthesis of the two schools of thought that have hitherto dominated the literature, namely the structural attributes and critical events approaches (see King et al 1990;Grofman and van Roozendaal 1997). Whereas the former approach relates duration to a set of characteristics or 'attributes' associated with Cabinets at the time of their formation, the latter seeks to explain duration in terms of the particular incidents or 'events' which trigger the fall of a government.…”