Party-system polarisation, legislative institutions and cabinet survival in 28 parliamentary democracies, 1945–2019

Abstract

The resurgence of radical and populist parties has stimulated renewed discussions about the resilience of parliamentary democracy in Europe. This work contributes to this debate by analysing the extent to which positive parliamentarism, the prime minister’s parliamentary dissolution powers, the government’s power to table votes of confidence and the majority requirements for votes of no confidence serve as ‘shock absorbers’ moderating the effect of ideological polarisation in European parliaments. Fitting several Cox Proportional Hazards models to data for 752 cabinets from 28 European democracies between 1945 and 2019, the well-established finding that the restrictiveness of the constructive vote of no confidence mitigates the destabilising effect of strong extreme parties on non-electoral cabinet replacements is confirmed. More counter-intuitively, the absence of positive parliamentarism reduces the risk of non-electoral cabinet replacements when ideologically extreme parties are strong.

Keywords:

• Polarisation
• cabinet survival
• legislative institutions
• coalition government

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Marc Debus, Steffen Ganghof, Daniela Giannetti, Reuven Hazan, Heike Klüver, Bjørn Erik Rasch, Petra Schleiter, Ulrich Sieberer and the participants of the workshop on ‘Parliaments and Government Termination Revisited’ at the Hebrew University Jerusalem for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Not least, we would like to thank Micaela Großmann and Jana Vogel for their research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The effect of prime-ministerial dissolution powers on, the second risk, early elections, depends on variables not observed in our dataset (e.g., the electoral prospects of the prime minister’s party), see Becher (2019). We are modelling the potential selection effect, at the point of coalition bargaining, of the prime minister’s ability unilaterally to decide on early dissolution.

2 One presidential democracy, Cyprus, was excluded, because government duration is fixed in presidential systems. In addition, 29 caretaker governments were excluded from empirical analyses.

3 Online appendix A.1 provides summary statistics of the variables used. A correlation matrix of all independent variables is included in online appendix A.2.

4 Online appendix A.1 shows that for a few cabinets manifesto data and data on extremist parties’ seat share is missing.

5 The respective correlations are shown in Online appendix A.3.

6 Interaction terms with the policy-specific dimensions were excluded from the model due to multicollinearity.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) under grant GSC 1024 (DFG project number 194490384).

Notes on contributors

Henning Bergmann

Henning Bergmann is a doctoral researcher at the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences (BAGSS, University of Bamberg). His research interests include coalitions with a focus on cabinet stability and the study of roll-call votes in the German Bundestag. His research has been published in the British Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. [[email protected]]

Hanna Bäck

Hanna Bäck is Professor of Political Science at Lund University. Her research mainly focuses on political parties and government formation in parliamentary democracies. She has published extensively in highly ranked journals on these topics, for example, in the European Journal of Political Research, Comparative Political Studies, and the British Journal of Political Science. [[email protected]]

Thomas Saalfeld

Thomas Saalfeld is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bamberg. His research focuses on the study of cabinet duration, the substantive representation of citizens of immigrant origin in European legislatures, and the analysis of political professionalisation of legislators in advanced parliamentary democracies. He has published extensively in peer-reviewed international journals on these topics, including the British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, International Studies Quarterly, and Parliamentary Affairs. [[email protected]]