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² See, for example, Warwick, Paul, ‘The Durability of Coalition Governments in Parliamentary Democracies’, Comparative Political Studies, 11 (1979), 465–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daalder, Hans, ‘Cabinets and Party Systems in Ten European Democracies’, Acta Politica, 6 (1971), 282–303Google Scholar; Sanders, David and Herman, Valentine M., ‘The Stability and Survival of Governments in Western Democracies’, Acta Politica, 12 (1977), 346–77Google Scholar; Strom, Kaare, ‘Party Goals and Government Performance in Parliamentary Democracies’, American Political Science Review, 79 (1985), 738–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lijphart, Arend, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-one Countries (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lijphart, Arend, ‘Measures of Cabinet Durability: A Conceptual and Empirical Evaluation’, Comparative Political Studies, 17 (1984), 265–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lijphart, Arend, ‘A Note on the Meaning of Cabinet Durability’, Comparative Political Studies, 17 (1984), 163–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁶ See Laakso, Marku and Taagepera, Rein, ‘Effective Number of Parties: A Measure with Application to West Europe’, Comparative Political Studies, 12 (1979), 3–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taagepera, Rein and Grofman, Bernard, ‘Effective Size and Number of Components’, Sociological Methods and Research, 10 (1981), 63–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taagepera, Rein and Grofman, Bernard, ‘Rethinking Duverger's Law: Predicting the Effective Number of Parties in Plurality and PR Systems – Parties Minus Issues Equals One’, European Journal of Political Research, 13 (1985), 341–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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¹¹ Dodd, , Coalitions, p. 18.Google Scholar

¹² Dodd, , Coalitions, p. 24.Google Scholar

¹³ Dodd, , Coalitions, pp. 28–9.Google Scholar

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¹⁹ While we might propose Hypothesis 4'(b): ‘Countries with either oversized or undersized coalitions will tend to be low in cabinet durability; and cabinet durability will be least in countries where both oversized and undersized coalitions are common. In contrast, countries with minimum winning coalitions will tend to have durable cabinets’, we find that Proposition 4'(a) fits the data marginally better than Proposition 4'(b) because Iceland, Japan, Luxembourg and Belgium, which belong to cell 2 due to fractionalization, are, unlike the other countries in cell 2, not characterized by either undersized or oversized coalitions. Thus, according to Proposition 4'(b), we should expect them to have long-lived cabinets. In fact, cabinet longevity in these countries is at an intermediate level.

²⁰ Instead of regressing the variable ‘cabinet duration’ on cabinet type, we might be better advised to regress a variable which expressed cabinet duration relative to a country's own norm against cabinet type. Pooling data for seven countries (from Finland to Israel) we obtain a correlation of 0.14 between relative cabinet duration and cabinet type compared to a correlation of 0.434 for the non-normalized bivariate relationship between cabinet duration and cabinet type. Thus, this line of approach does not seem promising.

²¹ For an alternative approach see Taagepera, Rein, ‘Reformulating the Cube Law for Proportional Representation Elections’, American Political Science Review, 80 (1986), 489–504CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which proposes a new model to account for parameter values of a posited non-linear relationship.

²² Lijphart, , Democracies.Google Scholar

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²⁴ See Schattschneider, E. E., The Semi-Sovereign People (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1968).Google Scholar

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²⁸ Taagepera, and Grofman, , ‘Rethinking Duverger's Law’; (personal communication, 02 1987).Google Scholar

²⁹ See Duverger, Maurice, ‘The Influence of Electoral Systems on Political Life’, International Social Science Bulletin, 3 (1951), 314–52Google Scholar; Duverger, Maurice, ‘Duverger's Law: Forty Years Later’Google Scholar, in Grofman, and Lijphart, , eds, Electoral Laws and Their Political ConsequencesGoogle Scholar; Riker, William, ‘The Two-Party System and Duverger's Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science’, American Political Science Review, 76 (1982), 753–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sartori, Giovanni, ‘Political Development and Political Engineering’, Public Policy, 17 (1968), 261–98.Google Scholar

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³² There are other ways in which the cabinet duration variable might have been operationalized, but it is not likely that such differences would have affected our results (see Lijphart, , ‘Measures of Cabinet Durability’).Google Scholar However, like Lijphart, (‘A Note on the Meaning of Cabinet Durability’)Google Scholar, I would caution against ‘the facile assumption that cabinet durability necessarily spells regime stability’ in some broader meaning of the latter term. Like Lijphart, I find cabinet duration to be a variable of sufficient intrinsic interest to be worthy of study.

³³ Lijphart, Arend, Bruneau, Thomas C., Diamandouros, P. Nikifors and Gunther, Richard, ‘A Mediterranean Model of Democracy: The Southern European Democracies in Comparative Perspective’, West European Politics, 11 (1988), 7–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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³⁶ See also Blondel, Jean, ‘Party Systems and Patterns of Government in Western Democracies’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 1 (1968), 180–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁷ If I replaces C, and with D (as usual) the dependent variable, we obtain a multivariate equation with I, MWC and P which has a multiple correlation of 0.77. If the mean vote share of the largest party replaces N (with data for twenty countries, 1945–80, from Midlarski, Manus, ‘Political Stability of Two-Party and Multiparty Systems: Probabilistic Bases for the Comparison of Party Systems’, American Political Science Review, 78 (1984), 929–57, p. 944)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, we obtain a multiple correlation of 0.8, again with P as the second significant variable. If mean total number of parties in the legislature replaces N (data for eighteen countries for the period 1964–74 taken from Mayer, , ‘Party Systems and Government Stability’, in Merkl, Peter H., ed., Western European Party Systems: Trends and Prospects (New York: Free Press, 1980), pp. 335–57, p. 342)Google Scholar, we obtain a multiple correlation of 0.77, with i rather than P as the second significant variable. In a stepwise regression with eight independent variables available, N and P are the two variables which enter as significant at an F cutoff of 2.0.

³⁸ See Browne, Eric C., Frendreis, John and Gleiber, Dennis, ‘An “Events” Approach to the Problem of Cabinet Stability’, Comparative Political Studies, 17 (1984), 167–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Browne, Eric C., Frendreis, John and Gleiber, Dennis, ‘Dissolution of Governments in Scandinavia: A Critical Events Perspective’, Scandinavian Political Studies, 9 (1986), 93–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Browne, Eric C., Frendreis, John and Gleiber, Dennis, ‘The Process of Cabinet Dissolution: An Exponential Model of Duration and Stability in Western Democracies’, American Journal of Political Science, 30 (1986), 628–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ciofli-Revilla, Claudio, ‘The Political Reliability of Italian Government: An Exponential Survival Model’, American Political Science Review, 78 (1984), 318–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Frendreis, John P., ‘Dennis Gleiber and Eric C. Browne, The Study of Cabinet Dissolutions in Parliamentary Democracies’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 11 (1986), 619–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁹ See Robertson, John D., ‘The Political Economy and the Durability of European Coalition Cabinets: New Variations on a Game-Theoretic Perspective’, Journal of Politics, 45 (1983), 933–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Robertson, John D., ‘Toward a Political-Economic Accounting of the Endurance of Cabinet Administrations: An Empirical Assessment of Eight European Democracies’, American Journal of Political Science, 28 (1984), 693–709.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁴¹ Feld, Scott L., Grofman, Bernard, Hartley, Richard, Kilgour, Mark O. and Miller, Nicholas, ‘The Uncovered Set in Spatial Voting Games’, Theory and Decision, 23 (1987), 129–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Feld, Scott L., Grofman, Bernard and Miller, Nicholas R., ‘Limits of Agenda Control in Spatial Voting Games’, Mathematical Modelling (1988, forthcoming).Google Scholar

⁴² See Schofield, Norman, Grofman, Bernard and Feld, Scott L., ‘The Core and Stability of Group Choice in Spatial Voting Games’, American Political Science Review, 82 (1988), 196–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁴⁴ Taagepera, and Grofman, , ‘Effective Size’Google Scholar; ‘Rethinking Duverger's Law’. Taagepera, , ‘The Inverse Square Law’Google Scholar, offers a similar sort of explanation, although its inspiration is not in game theoretic models but in terms of his own earlier work on seats-votes relationships (see Taagepera, , ‘Reformulating the Cube Law’).Google Scholar

⁴⁵ See Budge, Ian and Laver, Michael, ‘Party, Ideology and Party Distance: Analysis of Election Programmes in 19 Democracies’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 11 (1986), 607–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Budge, Ian, Robertson, David and Hearl, Derek, eds, Ideology, Strategy and Party Movement: A Comparative Analysis of a Post-war Election Programme in Nineteen Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar