Stability of minority governments and the role of support agreements

Abstract

How does the minority status of a government influence cabinet duration? This article analyzes the influence of minority status on cabinet duration by differentiating between different types of minority governments. Minority governments are not in general less stable than majority ones but different types of minority governments have different effects on cabinet duration. The main theoretical argument is that substantive minority governments without support agreements are less stable than majority governments, while contract minority governments that rely on written support agreements with non-cabinet parties which secure majority support in parliament are as stable as majority ones. Drawing on survival analysis, the effect of different minority cabinet types on cabinet stability is tested for 471 cabinets in 30 countries from 1977 until 2019. The results show that only minority governments without support partnerships have a substantially higher risk of early government termination than majority cabinets. The findings of this analysis have important implications for the coalition theory and the evaluation of minority governments.

Keywords:

• Government stability
• minority governments
• support parties
• comparative politics

Acknowledgements

Authors are listed alphabetically. Both authors contributed equally to all work. The authors would like to thank Heike Klüver, Mark Kayser, Lanny Martin, Thomas Poguntke, David Willumsen and three anonymous reviewers of West European Politics for their insightful comments on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The only other variable that was substantially significant over different model specifications was polarization which is the reason why we control for polarization in our statistical analysis below.

2 The countries included are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

3 A new cabinet starts with a general election, a change in set of parties holding cabinet portfolios, or a change of the head of cabinet.

4 For example, based on this criterium the latest Swedish minority cabinet Löfven II is not coded as having a written support agreement because the cabinet’s agreement with two liberal center parties does not result in an absolute legislative majority for the minority government plus support parties.

5 The authors thank Martin Mölder, Višeslav Raos, Dario Nikic Cakar and Janis Ikstens for providing valuable information on minority cabinets in Estonia, Croatia, and Latvia.

6 The results for the conflict and pooled sample are different than those in table 1 because the competing risks approach does allow using the shared frailty option. To make the results more comparable, we therefore abstained from using the shared frailty option in all models.

7 Among the replacements, there are 117 majority governments, 29 substantive minority governments, and 16 contract minority governments with a written agreement. For early elections, the numbers are as follows: 48 majority governments, 26 substantive minority governments, and 4 contract minority governments with a written agreement.

8 Since both measures correlate highly, it is not advisable to include them both in the same model.

9 The figures have been created with the plotplain scheme in Stata (Bischof 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Svenja Krauss

Svenja Krauss is a University Assistant/Postdoc at the University of Vienna. Her research interests include coalition governments, political parties, political behaviour and quantitative methods. She has published her research in West European Politics, Journal of European Public Policy, Parliamentary Affairs and other political science journals. [[email protected]]

Maria Thürk

Maria Thürk is a research fellow at the University of Basel. Her research focuses on party competition, legislative politics and minority as well as coalition governments. Her research has been published in the European Journal of Political Research, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Government & Opposition and other political science journals. [[email protected]]