Dynamic Party Support and Government Stability

• In Event: Election Timing: Causes and Consequences

Abstract

When and why do governments fall? Scholars have long theorized (Lupia & Strom 1995; Kayser 2005) but never tested how parties' changing electoral expectations between elections influence political maneuvering that terminate governing coalitions. Previous empirical investigations often relied on proportional hazard assumptions derived from static political and institution conditions or, at best, combined such models with discrete events. Employing a new dynamic measure of coalition inclusion probabilities derived, in part, from monthly party-level polling data in multiple European parliamentary democracies, we identify patterns of party prospects that most strongly predict different forms of government termination and opportunistic election calling.

Author

• Mark A. Kayser, Hertie School of Governance, Berlin