Follow the Leader? The Influence of Personalization on Cabinet Stability

How does the internal organization of political parties influence the stability of cabinets? In this paper, I analyze whether the party leader’s control over the internal organization of the party has an influence on the stability of the cabinets that form during the legislative term. Governments do not only terminate due to conflict between the government parties but also because of intra-party conflict. I argue that strong leaders can contribute to government stability by keeping their respective parties in line. If the party leader is able to control the organization of the party, she should also be able to control the behavior of her party in government. Accordingly, I hypothesize that the risk of early government termination is lower, the higher the control of the party leader over party organization. Even though this hypothesis holds for both, single-party and multi-party cabinets, I expect that the influence of personalization on cabinet stability is higher for single-party cabinets since the risk of early government termination is highly dependent on intra-party aspects for single-party cabinets. The hypotheses will be tested with the help of a newly compiled, comprehensive dataset which includes governments from ten Western European countries between the mid-1980s and 2016. My results will have important implications for the study of party organization and cabinet stability.