Polarization and Cabinet Survival in Parliamentary Democracies

Several scholars have discussed the problem of ‘gridlock’, focusing on the role of polarization among elites and rapidly deepening divisions among Members of Congress. The emphasis on polarization in the US literature resonates strongly with research on European party systems, observing a repolarization of politics resulting from the rise of populist parties. The extent to which populist rhetoric and polarized political discourse has spilled over from social and other media and begun to affect legislatures and cabinets is not always clear, however. Also, it is not entirely clear whether the polarization occurs on the traditional left-right dimension (for example over taxation or welfare spending), or whether the polarization is along a different dimension with parties supporting the status quo of representative democratic institutions and the existing economic model on the one hand and those critical of it on the other. This paper is a first step towards analyzing the consequences of both types of polarization on cabinet stability in European parliamentary systems, and aims to contribute to this literature by theorizing about, and evaluating hypotheses about the mediating effect of political institutions on the link between ideological polarization and cabinet survival. We investigate the impact of polarization on cabinet survival using a new data set covering 28 Western and Eastern European countries over the post-war period (1945–2013). Our results show that cabinets are less likely to survive when the share of seats controlled by extremist parties is high, suggesting the possible impact of disagreement over the systemic dimension. In addition, this effect is especially strong in settings without a constructive vote of no-confidence, which highlights the importance of the institutional context for the impact of polarization.