Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series editors' preface
- Acknowledgments
- PART I THE CONTEXT
- PART II THE MODEL
- PART III EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATIONS
- PART IV APPLICATIONS, EXTENSIONS, AND CONCLUSIONS
- 10 Party systems and cabinet stability
- 11 Making the model more realistic
- 12 Government formation, intraparty politics, and administrative reform
- 13 Governments and parliaments
- References
- Index
10 - Party systems and cabinet stability
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series editors' preface
- Acknowledgments
- PART I THE CONTEXT
- PART II THE MODEL
- PART III EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATIONS
- PART IV APPLICATIONS, EXTENSIONS, AND CONCLUSIONS
- 10 Party systems and cabinet stability
- 11 Making the model more realistic
- 12 Government formation, intraparty politics, and administrative reform
- 13 Governments and parliaments
- References
- Index
Summary
Thus far in this book we may appear to have talked more about the making than the breaking of governments. In fact, we model a continuous process characterizing the birth, life, and death of governments. Our model of government formation, therefore, is also a model of government duration and government termination. Each government that is born inevitably rises from the ashes of its predecessor. Thus, one of the most significant reasons to understand the government formation process has to do with the stability of governments. In most countries, government formation takes a relatively short time – a matter of days, at most a few weeks rather than months. Uncertainty about the partisan composition of the new government is thus typically resolved quite quickly. Something that is never fully revealed as events unfold, however, at least until the government actually falls, is how long the incumbent cabinet will last. An effective model of cabinet government should clearly provide an account of what breaks governments as well as what makes them, an account that can be used to estimate the durability of an incumbent government – or, indeed, of any prospective government. In this chapter, therefore, we set out to develop our model in a way that allows us to analyze the potential stability of governments.
Previous approaches to the analysis of government stability have for the most part been inductive, approaching the problem from one of two basic directions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Making and Breaking GovernmentsCabinets and Legislatures in Parliamentary Democracies, pp. 195 - 222Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996