While used to be seen as a phenomenon of crisis, minority governments are nowadays known to be a rational choice by political parties. Recent studies have shown that minority governments are durable and effective in legislative processes. However, by definition, they lack to represent an absolute majority of legislative deputies. Thus, there is always a majority of parties which seeks to potentially increase its office benefits. This paper examines how parties bargaining environments in parliament affect government turnover. One main factor, we argue, are cabinet parties' credible options to exit the current government and form an alternative. The higher the probability to participate in an alternative, ideologically more compatible government, the lower the costs of withdrawing (support) from the ruling cabinet. For the empirical investigation of our theoretical expectations, we rely on a newly compiled dataset that combines the coalition-inclusion probabilities of parties inparliamentary democracies with data on legislative support parties and cabinet duration. With the help of survival analysis, we estimate cabinet stability for xx democracies between 1980 and 2020. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of strategic coalition building, minority governance, and party competition.
