The Process of Formation of Parliamentary Governments

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics III & Comparative Politics of Advanced Industrial Societies
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Comparative Politics III

Abstract

Anecdotal claims related to the formation of parliamentary governments suggest that the duration of formation periods has increased over time. Presently, there is no empirical evidence to support or refute this claim. Broadly, the cabinet formation literature proposes two explanations for these delays, one concerning the uncertainty that political actors may face about key parameters, the other regarding the complexity of the bargaining environment. This literature suffers from two shortcomings. First, critical differences in formal rules such as the channels available to resolve an impasse in the formation process have been partly overlooked. Second, the existing studies are mostly limited to the usual Western European countries. In this paper, I replicate Martin and Vanberg (2003) and Golder (2010). I use the novel Parliamentary Events Dataset 1945-2020 to incorporate country-specific institutional heterogeneity in the models proposed by these authors. The goals of the replication exercise are the following: I verify whether these widely-accepted results hold (or can be improved) when formation spells are partitioned in a more nuanced way, considering variation in formal rules more rigorously and standalone caretaking periods; I test the empirical validity of the anecdotal claim that the duration of the formation process has gotten longer over time; I extend the original analyses beyond the traditional Western European cases with the inclusion of Eastern Europe and other major non-European parliamentary democracies.

Author

• Francesco Bromo, University of Oxford