Party System Polarisation, Anti-System Parties and Legislative Institutions as Predictors of Cabinet Survival in 28 Parliamentary Democracies, 1945–2013

In the past decade, legislatures in many parliamentary systems of government have witnessed a level of ideological polarization not seen since the 1940s. This is largely due to the rise of radical and populist parties in many European democracies. This has made cabinet formation more complicated where no single party won an overall majority of seats. The proposed paper will investigate the impact of polarization at the levels of the legislature and the cabinet to predict variations in cabinet duration. Relying partly on a number of existing datasets and data collected by the authors for this paper, we will focus particularly on the interaction between the interaction between institutional rules such as the prime minister’s dissolution powers or positive/negative parliamentarism to analyse the extent to which, and how, institutions serve as ‘shock absorbers’ that help governing parties to deal with shocks such as the rapid rise of politically extreme parties and the transformation of party competition from moderate to polarized pluralism (Sartori 1976). Theoretically, the paper will start from the familiar controversy between explanations focusing on the impact of extreme parties on the bargaining environment on the one hand and a veto-player framework on the other. This will be extended to capture the potential effect of particular legislative institutions. Empirically, we will use a standard competing-risks framework in survival analysis estimating interaction effects of polarization and institutional rules on the risk of cabinet terminations through cabinet reshuffles and early elections.