https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3830-7887
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ABSTRACT
Political science has traditionally devoted considerable attention to the issue of cabinet survival in several political systems. This study contributes to this established research agenda by investigating the dynamics of cabinet survival in Southern Europe – a region where cabinets have recently been striving to remain in office until the constitutionally mandated end of term. The study tests the impact of cabinet attributes, economic conditions, and the government formation process on different types of cabinet termination. It performs Cox survival analysis based on an original longitudinal multilevel dataset comprising 165 cabinets in six countries: Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, and Spain. The results show that oversized coalitions significantly increase the risk of cabinet termination, demonstrating the ingrained destabilizing effect of such ruling configurations on cabinet survival in Southern Europe. The study discusses the implications of this finding for the quality of democracy in this politically-sensitive region.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. The Prespa Agreement is the outcome of negotiations between the Greek government and the Republic of Macedonia, resolving the long-standing dispute between the two over the naming of MacedoniA.
2. Here I refer to the recent resignation of Mario Draghi, resulting from the last government crisis in Italy caused by intracoalitional conflicts, mainly involving Giuseppe Conte’s Five Star Movement, Matteo Salvini’s League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forward Italy (Improta, Citation2022).
3. The minority situation handled by Spanish then-Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who suffered from a lack of confidence by vital supporting parties in the legislature (Ciudadanos, PdeCAT, and PNV), is a telling example of such ruling configurations’ potential destabilizing effect.
4. Drawing onLaver (Citation2003) andSaalfeld (Citation2008), this study uses the terms ‘duration’, ‘durability’ and ‘survival’ interchangeably to indicate the time elapsed between cabinet formation and cabinet termination. It should be noted, however, that durability and survival are more appropriate when describing the statistical methods used for predicting the potential duration of a cabinet.
5. The unified model proposed byKing et al. (Citation1990) has paved the way for the use of so-called survival analysis in relation to government stability. Such a statistical technique has been widely employed in the medical field to investigate cancer patients’ chances of survival (Christensen, Citation1987). From that point onwards, many political science scholars started to use the term ‘government survival’ or ‘cabinet survival’ (e.g.,Saalfeld, Citation2008).
6. This path was pursued by Alexis Tsipras in Greece due to blame games with then-Finance Minister Yannis Varoufakis over economic and financial management .
7. In this regard, significant threats to survival are the withdrawal of fundamental government partners in a minimal winning coalition and the eruption of conflicts among party factions in a single-party majority government.
8. See also the economic voting literature (e.g., Lewis-Back and Paldam 2000).
9. Regarding inflation, data availability problems have been recorded. Notably, there is a lack of reliable sources for retrieving information on Cyprus and MaltA.
10. This situation is the most likely outcome of elections regulated by proportional representation systems (Lijphart, Citation1981,Citation1999).
11. This variable is operationalized through the classic Russell Dalton’s Polarisation Index (PI), which interpret party positions based on their electoral size (Dalton, Citation2008).
12. Bergman et al. (Citation2021) updated Sartori’s expectations of extreme parties’ behaviour by expanding this approach to modern populist parties. From their perspective, extreme parties challenged the fundamental rules of representative liberal democracy in the same way as populist parties of the right and left.
13. Eurovoc is a multilingual thesaurus maintained by the Publications Office of the European Union. It is used by the main European institutions, such as the European Parliament, national and regional parliaments, national government departments and other European organizations. The complete list of Southern European countries also includes the Holy See, San Marino and Turkey.
14. Governments in office at the time of writing have been excluded from the analysis. These governments are as follows: Anastasiades II (Cyprus), Mitsotakis (Greece), Draghi (Italy), Abela (Malta), Costa II (Portugal) and Sanchez II (Spain).
15. Due to space constraints, information on the operationalization of this variable is available in Appendix H.
16. The data on governments’ seat shares in the legislature derives from official sources provided by the electoral authority of each country, e.g., the Italian Ministry of the Interior.
17. I opted for this strategy considering that a competing risks framework (adopted in past studies, e.g., Saalfeld 2013) might cause estimation difficulties due to small Ns in subgroups.
18. Log-rank tests were performed to examine the equality of survivor functions (p < 0.000). Further information is available in the Appendix.
19. A different graphic representation of the model is presented inAppendix D. The findings are robust considering the inclusion of temporal factors (Appendix E) and institutional factors (Appendix F).
20. I employed the following censoring strategy: the records of the cabinets terminated for technical reasons are right censored (King et al., Citation1990).
21. However, by rerunning the regression analysis utilizing such coalition types as reference category, it proves to be the most stable coalition solution compared to minority and oversized configurations (see Appendix G).
22. In this regard, the last government crisis in Italy prompting Mario Draghi’s cabinet’s early termination is the ultimate instance of turbulence in the country’s coalition politics.
23. The genesis of the ‘Central Bloc’ government between 1983 and 1985 in Portugal goes back to the position of Ramalho Eanes, who, during his second presidential term, tried to foster a policy of consensus between the Socialist Party (PS) and the Social Democratic Party (PSD) (Cruz, Citation1994, p. 250).