Government Formation and Survival

Abstract

This panel will focus on government formation and survival, and how these two processes are related to each other. The panel comprises five papers. In the first paper, Matt Golder and Sona Golder (Pennsylvania State University) look at the role that heads of state in both Western and Eastern Europe play in the government formation process. To date, there has been little research looking at how heads of state influence the choice of prime minister or the party composition of governments. This is slowly beginning to change and this paper makes theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to this emerging literature. In the second paper, Marc Debus (Mannheim) looks at government formation at the sub-national level. The focus on government formation at the sub-national level represents a distinct departure from the existing literature, which has centered almost entirely on government formation at the national level. The Debus paper investigates how the sub-national government formation process is influenced by the composition of the national government and by voter preferences at both the national and sub-national levels. In the third paper, Hanna Back (Mannheim) and Patrick Dumont (University of Luxembourg) examine the consequences of government formation for government survival. Rather than treat government formation and survival in isolation as existing studies do, Back and Dumont take the novel step of treating government formation and survival as endogenous to one another. Specifically, Back and Dumont investigate how various characteristics of portfolio allocation influence government duration. In the fourth paper, Bergman and Hellström (Umea University) investigate the common thesis an increase in cabinet preference range increases the likelihood that a cabinet collapses. The fifth paper by Keudel-Kaiser looks at the next (or first) step in the coalition life-cycle, the formation of the next government, and illustrates the combination of conditions which lead to the formation of minority governments in CEE region. The panel has two discussants: (i) Lanny Martin (Rice University) and (ii) Torbjorn Bergman (Sodertörn University and Umea University, Sweden).

Title	Details
The Formation of Minority Governments in Central and Eastern Europe	View Paper Details
Birds of a Feather Flock Together? Government Duration and Cabinet Ideological Diversity in Western Europe	View Paper Details
Formateurs, Governing Coalitions, and the Sequential Government Formation Process	View Paper Details
Voter’s Preferences and Government Formation in European Multi-Level Systems	View Paper Details
Portfolio Allocation and Cabinet Survival in Parliamentary Democracies	View Paper Details