This paper examines how the economy and time affect cabinet survival and termination. The literatures on endogenous election calling and cabinet durability concur that these dynamic factors should impact on cabinet stability. Yet precisely how they shape cabinet survival has not been well understood because existing scholarship has ignored the varying constitutional powers of cabinets to manage their own termination in response to economic conditions and the elapsing parliamentary term. This paper offers a first analysis of the interaction between economic shocks, time and constitutional rules on politicians’ decisions to terminate cabinets. Drawing on cabinets data from 31 parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies in Western and Eastern Europe and we find that heterogeneity in the constitutional rules can cause governments to respond in diametrically opposed ways to booms and busts. The same constitutional variation also gives rise to fundamentally different patterns of time dependence in government terminations. The paper thus provides a first dynamic account of cabinet terminations and its results have far-reaching implications for related literatures. Our findings not only help to clarify the scope conditions which apply to political economy theories of endogenous elections calling, they also yield the first empirical evidence that politicians strategically manage non-electoral cabinet replacements, a finding that has so far eluded the dominant bargaining school of coalition studies.
