Survival of the fittest? Cabinet duration in postcommunist Europe

Comparative Politics

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 313-329

  Somer Topcu, Zeynep ^a   Williams, Laron K ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b TEXAS A AND M UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 44649200129     PISSN: 00104159     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5129/001041508X12911362383075     Document Type: Review

References (70)

1. See Juan Linz, "Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy: Does It Make a Difference?," in Juan Linz and Arturo Valenzuela, eds., Failure of Presidential Democracy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994);
2. Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, "What Makes Democracies Endure?," Journal of Democracy, 7 (1996), 39-55.
3. Eric C. Browne, John P. Frendreis, and Dennis W. Gleiber, "An Events Approach to the Problem of Cabinet Stability," Comparative Political Studies, 17 (1984), 167-97;
4. Eric C. Browne, John P. Frendreis, and Dennis W. Gleiber, "The Process of Cabinet Dissolution: An Exponential Model of Duration and Stability in Western Democracies," American Journal of Political Science, 30 (1986), 628-50;
5. Gary King, James E. Alt, Nancy Elizabeth Burns, and Michael Laver, "A Unified Model of Cabinet Dissolution in Parliamentary Democracies," American Journal of Political Science, 34 (1990), 846-71;
6. Paul V. Warwick, Government Survival in Parliamentary Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
7. Jean Blondel and Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, Cabinets in Eastern Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2001);
8. Karen Henderson and Neil Robinson, Post-Communist Politics: An Introduction (Hertfordshire: Prentice Hall, 1997).
9. Lawrence A. Lowell, Government and Parties in Continental Europe, vols. 1 and 2 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1896).
10. Michael Taylor and V. M. Herman, "Party Systems and Government Stability," American Political Science Re-view, 65 (1971), 28-37.
11. D. Sanders and V. Herman, "The Stability and Survival of Governments in Western Democracies," Acta Politica, 26 (1977), 346-77.
12. Lawrence Dodd, Coalitions in Parliamentary Government (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1976).
13. Paul Warwick, "The Durability of Coalition Governments in Parliamentary Democracies," Comparative Political Studies, 11 (1979), 465-98.
14. Following the events approach, a coalition is considered terminated if (1) there were elections, (2) the prime minister voluntarily resigned, (3) the prime minister died, (4) dissention within government occurred (5) parliamentary support dropped or (6) the head of state intervened. Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, Katia Fettelschoss, and Philipp Harfst, "Party Government in Central European Democracies: A Data Collection (1990-2003)," European Journal of Political Research, 43 (2005), 869-94.
15. Browne, Frendreis, and Gleiber, "An Events Approach to the Problem of Cabinet Stability";
16. Browne, Frendreis, and Gleiber, "The Process of Cabinet Dissolution."
17. Browne, Frendreis, and Gleiber, "An Events Approach to the Problem of Cabinet Stability," p. 179.
18. Ibid., p. 179.
19. Browne, Frendreis, and Gleiber, "The Process of Cabinet Dissolution," p. 635.
20. King, Alt, Barnes, and Laver.
21. Henderson and Robinson.
22. Ibid.
23. Blondel and Müller-Rommel.
24. On the lack of mass partisanship, see Timothy J. Colton, Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them in the New Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000);
25. on the substantial electoral volatility, see Margit Tavits, "The Development of Stable Support: Electoral Dynamics in Post-Communist Europe," American Political Science Review, 65 (2005), 283-98;
26. on weak party system institutionalization, see Scott Mainwaring and Mariano Torcal, "Party System Institutionalization and Party System Theory after the Third Wave of Democracy," Working Paper #319 (2005);
27. for fractionalized parties, see Robert Moser, "Electoral Systems and the Number of Parties in Postcommunist States," World Politics (1999), 359-84;
28. for parties without crystallized ideological programs, see Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Markowski, and Gabor Toka, Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
29. Blondel and Müller-Rommel.
30. Taylor and Herman.
31. Dodd, "Party Coalitions in Multiparty Parliaments."
32. Warwick, Government Survival in Parliamentary Democracies, p. 41.
33. Lowell, pp. 73-74.
34. Warwick, Government Survival in Parliamentary Democracies, p. 35.
35. George Tsebelis, "Decision Making in Political Systems: Veto Players in Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, Multicameralism, and Multipartism," British Journal of Political Science, 25 (1995), 289-325.
36. See Dodd, Coalitions in Parliamentary Government;
37. Sanders and Herman; Kaare Strom, "Minority Governments in Parliamentary Democracies: The Rationality of Nonwinning Cabinet Solutions," Comparative Political Studies, 17 (1984), 199-227;
38. Warwick, Government Survival in Parliamentary Democracies.
39. Strom, p. 199.
40. Warwick, Government Survival in Parliamentary Democracies.
41. Taylor and Herman.
42. Dodd, "Party Coalitions in Multiparty Parliaments."
43. Ibid., p. 1101.
44. Blondel and Müller-Rommel.
45. Klaus Armingeon and Romana Careja, Comparative Data Set for 28 Post-Communist Countries, 1989-2004 (Institute of Political Science, University of Berne, 2004).
46. Blondel and Müller-Rommel.
47. Henderson and Robinson, p. 256.
48. Douglas A. Hibbs, "The Mass Public and Macroeconomic Performance: The Dynamics of Public Opinion toward Unemployment and Inflation," American Journal of Political Science, 23 (1979), 705-31.
49. John D. Robertson, "The Political Economy and the Durability of European Coalition Cabinets: New Variations on a Game-Theoretic Perspective," Journal of Politics, 45 (1983), 932-57;
50. John D. Robertson, "Toward a Political-Economic Accounting of the Endurance of Cabinet Administrations: An Empirical Assessment of Eight European Democracies," American Journal of Political Science, 28 (1984), 693-709.
51. Robertson, "The Political Economy and the Durability of European Coalition Cabinets"; Robertson, "Toward a Political-Economic Accounting of the Endurance of Cabinet Administrations."
52. Harvey D. Palmer and Guy D. Whitten, "Government Competence, Economic Performance and Endogenous Election Dates," Electoral Studies, 19 (2000), 413-26.
53. Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections: The Major Western Democracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988);
54. G. Bingham Powell and Guy D. Whitten, "A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context," American Journal of Political Science, 37 (1993), 391-414.
55. Blondel and Müller-Rommel.
56. Müller-Rommel, Fettelschoss, and Harfst.
57. Richard Rose and Neil Munro, Elections and Parties in New European Democracies (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2003).
58. th party.
59. Single party government (one party holds the majority in parliament and all government seats); minimal winning coalition (all parties in government are necessary to form a majority government); surplus coalition (coalition governments that exceed the minimal winning criteria); single party minority government (the party in government does not possess the majority of seats in parliament); multiparty minority government (the parties in government do not possess the majority of seats in parliament); and caretaker government (temporary cabinet). Müller-Rommel, Fettelschoss, and Harfst.
60. World Bank, World Development Indicators (2003); International Labour Office, Yearbook of Labour Statistics (various years).
61. The International Labour Office provides the monthly consumer price index for all ten states in the sample since the transition. The monthly inflation rate is created as the percentage change in CPI from one month to the next. Other states have available data from the following dates: Poland monthly 1/1999-12/2003; Hungary, quarterly 2/1992-11/2003; Czech Republic, monthly 1/1993-12/2003; Slovakia, monthly 1/1993-12/2003; Slovenia, quarterly 5/1997-11/2003; Bulgaria, monthly 3/1992-12/1994 and quarterly 3/2000-12/2003; Romania, monthly 2/1992-12/2003; Estonia, quarterly 2/1997-11/1998 and monthly 1/1999-12/2003; Latvia, monthly 7/1993-12/2003; Lithuania, monthly 1/1994-12/2003.
62. The change in unemployment rate from one year to the next is divided by twelve months and then added to each subsequent month's value, creating a linear interpolation.
63. Duration modeling provides two principal benefits of handling these probabilities of failure within a duration analysis framework rather than using OLS. First, the OLS estimation technique does not effectively deal with those observations that have yet to experience the event. OLS either excludes the cases that are not completed or treats those observations as having occurred. Both of these approaches are incorrect. Duration analysis produces a better alternative to OLS by treating the observations at the end of the sample as still containing valuable information about the underlying hazard rate. The other principal advantage to using duration analysis is that OLS is unable to deal with the naturally occurring time dependence of a process like government removal. See Christopher Zorn, "Modeling Duration Dependence," Political Analysis, 8 (2000), 367-80.
64. It is assumed that the assumption that the probability of removal from office at time t is a function of a list of covariates and of whether that government was in office at time t-1. This assumption leads to the natural conclusion that any omitted variables will lead to autocorrelation, which OLS can not deal with satisfactorily. Alternatively, logit analyses fail because "an indicator variable cannot capture the variability in duration time a state spends prior to adoption - precisely the effect we are trying to understand." Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier and Bradford M. Jones, "Time Is of the Essence: Event History Models in Political Science," American Journal of Political Science, 41 (October 1997), 336-83. This approach causes inefficient estimates with large variances.
65. Specifying the incorrect distribution will cause the inferences "regarding the relationship between the covariates and the duration time [to] be misleading since covariate estimates can be sensitive to the distribution function specified." Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier and Bradford S. Jones, Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) p. 21.
66. The first model is estimated with a number of different specifications of the underlying hazard rate, including the Gompertz, exponential, Weibull, log logistic, and generalized Gamma. The Weibull estimation has both the largest log likelihood and the smallest Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). Further, the parameters from the Gamma model make it possible to test various distributions. The κ parameter is significant at the .000 level, which implies that the null hypothesis that κ= 0 (which is the test of the lognormal distribution) can be rejected. Additional Wald tests show that the null hypothesis that κ=1 (Weibull distribution) can not be rejected but the null hypothesis σ=1 can be rejected. A chi square test of the sigma parameter shows that the null hypothesis σ=1 (with a chi square of 110.92, with one degree of freedom and a p-value of .000) can be rejected. This rules out the exponential model since the null hypothesis κ=1 can not be rejected but the null hypothesis σ=1 can be rejected. The Wald test that the κ and σ parameters are equal is also rejected implying that the Gamma distribution is not effective.
67. The single party variable includes single party majority goverments; the surplus coalition variable only includes surplus coalitions; the minority variable includes both single party minorities and multiple party minorities; and the caretaker goverment includes only caretaker goverments.
68. Matthew Soberg Shugart and John M. Carey, Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
69. Logging the inflation rate removes the unit root and makes the series stationary.
70. On the lack of mass partisanship, see Colton; on electoral volatility, see Tavits; on weak party system institutionalization, see Mainwaring and Torcal; on fractionalized parties, see Moser; on parties without crystallized ideological programs, see Kitschelt, Mansfeldova, Markowski, and Toka.