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Party Goals and Government Performance in Parliamentary Democracies

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  • Strom, Kaare

Abstract

From assumptions of parties as rational actors, this study develops four measures of government performance: duration, mode of resignation, subsequent alternation, and electoral success. These measures are used in a test of competing hypotheses concerning minority government performance in parliamentary democracies. Minority governments are conventionally portrayed as poor performers, but tests of this proposition have been seriously limited. An alternative hypothesis depicts minority governments as rational cabinet solutions without significant performance liabilities. These hypotheses are tested against an extensive cross-national data set including 323 postwar governments in 15 parliamentary democracies. The conventional wisdom about minority governments is not supported by the evidence. In some respects, minority governments are clearly superior to majority coalitions. Moreover, minority government formation may enhance systemic responsiveness and accountability. The findings support the explanation of minority governments as rational cabinet solutions.

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  • Strom, Kaare, 1985. "Party Goals and Government Performance in Parliamentary Democracies," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 79(3), pages 738-754, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:79:y:1985:i:03:p:738-754_22
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Daniel Diermeier & Hulya Eraslan & Antonio Merlo, 2002. "Bicameralism and Government Formation, Second Version," PIER Working Paper Archive 07-010, Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, revised 01 Feb 2007.
    2. Goodin, Robert E. & Güth, Werner & Sausgruber, Rupert, 2008. "When to Coalesce: Early Versus Late Coalition Announcement in an Experimental Democracy," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 38(1), pages 181-191, January.
    3. Merlo, Antonio, 1997. "Bargaining over Governments in a Stochastic Environment," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 105(1), pages 101-131, February.
    4. Castro, Vítor & Martins, Rodrigo, 2013. "Is there duration dependence in Portuguese local governments' tenure?," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 26-39.
    5. G. Bingham Powell Jr, 1989. "Constitutional Design and Citizen Electoral Control," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 1(2), pages 107-130, April.
    6. Natasha Kossovsky & Kathleen M. Carley, 2020. "The collapse of the second Yatsenyuk government: roll call vote and dynamic network analysis," Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, Springer, vol. 26(1), pages 123-143, March.
    7. Silvia Fedeli & Francesco Forte, 2011. "A survival analysis of the circulation of the political elites governing Italy from 1861 to 1994," Working Papers in Public Economics 141, Department of Economics and Law, Sapienza University of Roma.
    8. Fabrizio Carmignani, 2001. "Political Data for Applied Political Economy Research," Working Papers 43, University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics, revised Jul 2001.
    9. Nunnari, Salvatore & Zápal, Jan, 2017. "Dynamic Elections and Ideological Polarization," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 25(4), pages 505-534, October.
    10. Kaare Strom, 1989. "Inter-party Competition in Advanced Democracies," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 1(3), pages 277-300, July.

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