When is a government at stake? As the majority of cabinets in European democracies are terminated by the choice of political actors, this is not solely an empirical question. Varying levels of government durability across countries and within countries over time clearly have implications in regard to the nature of governance, decision-making, and the relationship between executive and legislative powers.
The German constitution gives both the government and the opposition instruments to ask for early government terminations in hard times. In the history of post-war Germany (since 1949) we can identify at least seven situations in which the survival of the incumbent government was threatened. The Federal Chancellor asked the parliament for his support and has used the vote of confidence a total of five times, which led to three dissolutions followed by early elections. Twice, the opposition tried to bring down the government by using the vote of no confidence.
This paper aims to establish a theory-driven framework to explain the occurrence of these seven critical cases. In contrast to previous small-N and case study research on German coalitions, I will not provide a narrative approach. Instead, I will model the considerations of the relevant actors (government and opposition parties) by referring to the formal model of early coalition terminations from Lupia and Strøm (1995). Several data sources on parties’ performance at opinion polls, legislative voting behavior, portfolio allocation and policy distance will be used to estimate the parties’ considerations of maintaining or terminating the cabinet.
