Early Marriages Last Longer: Pre-electoral Coalitions and Government Survival in Europe

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Early Marriages Last Longer: Pre-electoralCoalitions and Government Survival inEurope

Mihail Chiru

Government and Opposition / FirstView Article / May 2014, pp 1 - 24DOI: 10.1017/gov.2014.8, Published online: 27 May 2014

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0017257X14000086

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Mihail Chiru*

Early Marriages Last Longer: Pre-electoralCoalitions and Government Survivalin Europe

While the existence of pre-electoral coalitions fundamentally modifies thebargaining environment in which potential cabinet formulas are negotiated, thesurvival chances of cabinets that include them follow predictable yet differentpatterns to those of ‘regular’ coalition governments. This article combines originaland existing data sets on Western and Central and Eastern European cabinetswith information about pre-electoral coalitions (1944–2008) in order to estimatethe impact of such alliances on government survival rates. In doing so, I employa Cox Proportional Hazard model and a ‘competing risks’ research designwhich distinguishes between replacement and early election hazards. The findingsindicate that both Western and post-communist cabinets formed by pre-electoralcoalitions exhibit considerably lower rates of discretionary terminations. This effectis reversed in the case of incumbent pre-electoral coalitions. Last but not least,Western European cabinets that replicate pre-electoral coalitions are significantlyless likely to end through dissolution and early elections.

IN RECENT YEARS PRE-ELECTORAL COALITIONS (PECS) HAVE BECOME

increasingly common in both Western advanced democracies(Golder 2005) and in their younger counterparts in Central andEastern Europe (CEE) (Ibenskas 2011; Kitschelt et al. 1999; Rose andMunro 2009). Nevertheless, the amount of academic interest receivedby the phenomenon has remained modest, especially regarding therelationship between these electoral alliances and the formation and lifecycle of cabinets taking office afterwards. As Müller et al. (2008: 25) putit in their thorough review of coalition theory: ‘The potential gains frominter-party coordination in the electoral arena have not received muchattention in coalition research.’

* Mihail Chiru is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Central EuropeanUniversity, Budapest and is also affiliated with the Centre for Social Diagnosis at theLucian Blaga University in Sibiu. Contact email: [email protected].

Government and Opposition, page 1 of 24, 2014doi:10.1017/gov.2014.8

© The Author 2014. Published by Government and Opposition Limited and Cambridge University Press

The limited comparative research carried out up until now onpre-electoral coalitions has focused mostly on the logic behind theformation of such alliances, either at the party system level – testingthe disproportionality and signalling hypotheses (Golder 2005) – orin relation to the parties’ individual and combined characteristics(Golder 2006a). Albeit less extensively, pre-electoral coalitions werealso studied as a source for governing coalition agreements (Strømand Müller 2000) and as a mediating factor for proportional port-folio allocation (Carroll and Cox 2007). A different direction of studywas the experimental investigation of voters’ reactions to such alli-ances (Gschwend and Hooghe 2008; Hooghe et al. 2011). Beyondthat, there are a vast number of country studies that analyse thecontext and political consequences of specific pre-electoral coalitions(Allern and Aylott 2009; Andeweg 1989; Hanley 1999; Mitchell 1999;Saalfeld 2000).

In her influential article, Sona Golder (2005: 645–6) identifiedthree main reasons why pre-electoral coalitions are significant forstudents of government politics: they affect the composition andpolicies of the cabinet; they can make the government formationprocess more transparent and thus provide a stronger policy mandate;and they are quite common in post-industrial democracies. Beyondthese revealing rationales, I argue that the existence of pre-electoralcoalitions modifies fundamentally the bargaining environment inwhich potential cabinet formulas are negotiated and that the survivalchances of cabinets which include them follow predictable, yet differentpatterns to those of regular coalition governments. Consequently, thecentral research question addressed by this study asks: What is theimpact of pre-electoral coalitions on government survival rates inEurope? Secondary questions are: Does it make a difference to gov-ernment durability whether the member parties of the pre-electoralcoalition had governed together in the previous electoral cycle? Is therelationship different for Central and Eastern European cabinets? Inorder to answer these questions I analyse the composition, structuralattributes, institutional covariates and survival rates of 534 Westernand Central and Eastern European cabinets, the oldest of which wasformed in June 1944, while the most recent started governing inDecember 2008.

The introduction is followed by a review of the reasons for pre-electoral coalitions influencing governmental survival rates. Next,I present the main coordinates of the research design: data, methods

2 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION


and the logic behind the control variables employed. The thirdsection introduces a number of descriptive statistics and visualrepresentations of the incidence of cabinets including pre-electoralcoalitions. The main analytical section includes the presentation anddiscussion of the findings of the ‘competing risks’ survival models.These are run first on the pooled sample, and then separately on theWestern subsample in order to check more robustly the main effects,as the Western data set allowed for a larger number of controlvariables. The conclusion synthesizes the main findings of the studyand points to further possible avenues of research.

WHY DO PRE-ELECTORAL COALITIONS MATTER FORCABINET DURABILITY?

The methodological advances that literature on government durabilityhas made in the last decades (see the Methods section below) havebeen complemented by the development of more comprehensivetheoretical accounts based primarily on formal models that incor-porate the voluntary termination assumption (Lupia and Strøm 1995,2008) or search for governmental equilibriums (Laver and Shepsle1998). However, the vast majority1 of the empirical-centred work andall theoretical models of cabinet durability have failed to differentiatebetween cabinets based on pre-electoral coalitions and the rest.Then, why should such a distinction be important? Pre-electoralcoalitions modify fundamentally the bargaining environment inwhich potential cabinet formulas are negotiated. Thinking in termsof the bargaining model proposed by Lupia and Strøm (2008), pre-electoral coalitions have the potential to increase the bargainingpower of their members relative to outside partners or opponents,beyond the sum of the influences of their component parties,because they reduce both uncertainty (for voters and other politicalcompetitors) and transaction costs.

Pre-electoral coalitions should contribute to the reduction ofuncertainty since many of them are essentially devised for signallingpurposes: that member parties are able to form an effective govern-ment; that member parties wish to empower voters in choosing thecoalition government; and to signal to the voters the identity of apotential future government (Golder 2005: 649–50). Reduceduncertainty implies that a substantial popular vote allowing the

EARLY MARRIAGES LAST LONGER 3


pre-electoral coalition to form the government provides the newcabinet with both higher legitimacy and a stronger policy mandate(Golder 2005: 645–6) than coalitions formed after the announce-ment of electoral results. Both elements could prevent or moderatethe scale of radical negative swings in public opinion that sometimesbring down cabinets.

The first type of signalling argument is common in those systemsdominated by a major party that manages to govern alone forextended periods of time (for example, the Social Democratic Party inSweden). When the other parties coalesce in a pre-electoral coalitionand receive from voters the opportunity to replace the dominant partyin power, a stable government lacking serious conflicts becomes a directmeasure of their viability as alternatives to the ‘usual’ party in charge ofadministering the country.

The other two types of signalling could make cabinets founded onpre-electoral agreements and announcements more credible andbetter able to gather outside support, from voters and from financialmarkets. Although exogenous to the cabinet itself, this confidence, orat least the feeling of predictability that pre-electoral coalitionstransmit, could help the executive fulfil its mandate better and resistchallenges that appear later on.

Unlike coalition cabinets formed after elections, governmentsbased exclusively on pre-electoral coalitions can most likely draw ona number of institutional mechanisms that have already been devel-oped to enforce and supervise the ‘contract’ enforcement betweenthe partners. An example of such mechanisms is represented bycoalition coordination boards that decide on disputed candidaturesat regional or national level and are used afterwards to solve conflictsbetween members of the component parties arising in local andregional elected or appointed bodies, or at the level of governmentalagencies.

Moreover, pre-electoral coalition governments might last longerbecause they cooperate much more strongly in the legislativearena. One form of such cooperation is the majoritarian allocation oflegislative offices among the pre-electoral coalition member parties.Whereas post-electoral coalition governments even distribute legis-lative offices to opposition parties in order to increase monitoringcapacity and to limit abuses of power by the partners, pre-electoralcoalition-based cabinets were shown to ‘concentrate the distributionof offices within the coalition’ (Carroll 2007: 15). As a consequence,



pre-electoral coalition cabinets have greater control over legislativepolicies – a fact which, in turn, is likely to help them survive for longer.

Another reason why pre-electoral coalitions might influencegovernmental durability concerns the fact that in most of these casespartners negotiate and agree well in advance on the major policydimensions that would form the backbone of the governmentalprogramme. The agreement on policies is extended in some caseseven to portfolio allocation (Carroll 2007). Because of thesearrangements and their early timing, the likelihood that the pre-electoral coalition member parties will make credible commitments(Laver and Shepsle 1990; Lupia and Strøm 2008) is higher and,consequently, disagreements appearing later on can be solved muchmore easily. Additionally, in a study of coalitions in 27 young andconsolidated democracies, Carroll and Cox (2007: 310) have illu-strated that the plausible norm of fairness that is expected to governthe distribution of offices in such a situation does occur more oftenand more extensively than for other cabinets: ‘[p]re-election pactsthat commit their signatories to enter government together intro-duce a strong Gamsonian element into portfolio allocations.’

The logic implying a longer duration for cabinets composed onlyof pre-electoral coalitions, compared with those that lack a pre-electoral coalition or include additional parties, can also be linked tothe cooperation that some pre-electoral coalitions entail at all partyorganizational levels during the campaign. Thus, because theiractivists and mid-level party elites have fought elections together,there is a higher likelihood that they will develop an increasedmutual understanding of the needs and priorities of their partnersonce in government. This understanding could further translate intoless pressure from party leaders and the rank and file on the parties’cabinet members to discard the others’ concerns and embark onzero-sum games. For all these reasons I hypothesize that:

Hypothesis 1: Cabinets that replicate completely pre-electoral coalitions areless likely to terminate discretionarily than other coalitions.

The durability of pre-electoral coalition-based cabinets should bemore visible in early election terminations. In the case of a pre-electoral coalition cabinet, dissolution and early elections wouldmean rethinking an entire electoral strategy, and more precisely,taking decisions on whether to keep the old pre-electoral coalitionlabel, and whether and how to reposition the party vis-à-vis pre-electoral



coalition partners (Carroll 2007: 5). Such decisions might provecostly, especially because of the uncertainty regarding how formervoters of the pre-electoral coalition would perceive the failure of thegovernment, who is to blame for it and whether the pre-electoralcoalition or its component parties separately are worthy of a newmandate. For these reasons, leaders of pre-electoral coalition cabinetsare more likely to prefer non-electoral discretionary terminations – thatis, replacements instead of early elections.

Hypothesis 2: Cabinets that replicate completely pre-electoral coalitionsdiminish the risk of government termination by early election.

This article will also analyse the durability of cabinets includingpre-electoral coalitions formed between the governing parties thathad been in power during the term before the election. Such asituation is not uncommon, with many Western (for example, the‘Purple Coalition’ in the Netherlands) and some Eastern coalitions(for example, Mikulas Dzurinda’s cabinets in Slovakia) asking votersfor a mandate to continue their programme and actually receiving it.For these incumbent pre-electoral coalition-based cabinets, the pro-spect of their durability is rather ambivalent. On the one hand, theyshould enjoy all the positive advantages discussed above. On theother hand, the new cabinet could carry a legacy of unresolvedconflicts and personal frictions that had not exploded in the firstmandate. Moreover, later in the term, party leaders might becomeworried that their brand or label identities become blurred after somany years of cooperation with the other parties, and thus decide foran abrupt exit. Therefore I hypothesize that:

Hypothesis 3: Incumbent pre-electoral coalition-based cabinets are morelikely to terminate discretionarily than other coalitions.

There are a number of reasons why the relationship between pre-electoral coalitions and government durability might work differentlyfor cabinets in Central and Eastern Europe. On the one hand, theargument that pre-electoral coalition-based governments are morestable because they receive a stronger policy mandate from votersshould apply to a lesser extent in the post-communist systems. Thereis generally little mandate responsiveness in the region; parties aresomewhat unable to differentiate themselves clearly ideologically orto follow policy promises that they have made during campaigns(Roberts 2009: 79–88).



On the other hand, Central and Eastern European politics arecharacterized by ‘hyper-accountability’ (Roberts 2009: 72) – that is,incumbents are punished quite severely at the polls. This can in turnincrease significantly the electoral costs of being perceived respon-sible for the dissolution of a cabinet that people have (almost) votedfor directly.

Unlike their Central and Eastern European counterparts (Tavits2008), Western European parties still enjoy relatively stable electo-rates (Mair et al. 2004), which alleviates the risk of complete parlia-mentary extinction following governmental underperformance inpre-electoral coalition-based cabinets. The disastrous experiences ofthe Solidarity Electoral Action (Akcja Wyborcza Solidarność – AWS)in Poland (2001) or the Christian Democratic National Peasants’Party (Partidul Național Țărănesc Creștin Democrat – PNTCD) inRomania (2000), who were faced with this situation only four yearsafter they had come into power on waves of hope and enthusiasticsupport, are significant lessons that could influence the strategicbehaviour of actors forming pre-electoral coalitions and cabinetsbased on them in Central and Eastern Europe.

Last but not least, another difference relevant for our comparisonis that most Western European parties have developed and maintainedstrong programmatic links with voters, whereas a large number of par-ties in Central and Eastern Europe rely more on the leaders’ charismaand clientelist appeal (Kitschelt 2011). This matters because policy-motivated voters are likely to value policy responsiveness over cabinetstability if conflict between the coalition partners revolves around keypolicy promises, whereas the reverse scenario is more likely in Centraland Eastern Europe.

Hypothesis 4: The survival rates of pre-electoral coalition-based cabinetsshould be higher in Central and Eastern Europe.

Unlike Golder (2006b), I argue that the relationship betweenpre-electoral coalitions and cabinet durability should also apply toreplacement governments, not only to those taking office immedi-ately after elections. This is because the common pledges madeduring the campaign and the corresponding expectations they raisein voters are unlikely to be forgotten when a reshuffle takes place or anew party is admitted in the coalition. In other words, even if thebargaining environment changes after the election, it is difficult tobelieve that the component parties can free themselves completely



and credibly from the commitments made through the pre-electoralpact, and the constraints established by it. Moreover, limiting theanalysis only to post-electoral cabinets could hide effects that mighttake longer to materialize.

Control Variables

Despite the fact that there is ‘no baseline model of governmentduration well accepted in the literature’ (Golder 2006b: 128), there isa certain agreement on the building blocks that must be included insuch models. These blocks relate to government structural attributes,legislative characteristics and attributes of the political system (Laver2003; Saalfeld 2008; Strøm and Swindle 2002; Warwick 1994).

Government structural attributes. The controls pertaining to this cate-gory that I introduce in the pooled model are: single-party majoritycabinet, single-party minority cabinet, minority coalition, minimum-winningcoalition, caretaker and maximum government duration. The WesternEuropean models also analyse whether the government is an ideolo-gically connected cabinet and whether the maximum bargaining powerparty is included or not.

As Damgaard (2008: 314) puts it, ‘single-party governments orminimal-winning coalitions are simply better equipped than others toavoid conflicts and survive’. On the other hand, single-party majoritycabinets are also more likely to use the dissolution and early electionsoption strategically (Strøm and Swindle 2002). A higher risk ofdiscretionary termination was also associated with minority govern-ments, a fact generally explained by their limited capacity to generateeffective policy (Strøm and Swindle 2002), an inability that usuallytranslates into heavy electoral loss. Caretaker governments should notlast for very long, given their provisional nature (Golder 2006b: 128).Maximum government duration is important because cabinets that areinvested only shortly before the regular elections generally have littleauthority to implement significant policy changes and they are alsoless likely to be able to enjoy the benefits of such changes. Moreover,such cabinets appear more inclined to call early elections (Lupia andStrøm 1995).

It has been argued that coalition cabinets formed between policy-compatible parties – that is, parties with common or similar stanceson various ideological dimensions – perform better and have a



higher durability (de Swaan 1973; Warwick 1994). Since pre-electoralcoalitions are themselves more likely to appear between ideologicallyproximate parties, it can be legitimately questioned whether thepolicy connection is not the cause of the hypothesized relationshipbetween pre-electoral coalitions and government survival rates.This is why I control for ideologically connected cabinets. Finally, theinclusion of the maximum bargaining power party in the cabinet wasshown to increase the government’s chances of surviving (Damgaard2008: 318).

Parliamentary attributes. In the pooled model I control for legislativefragmentation using the effective number of parliamentary parties(ENPP). For the Western subsample it was also possible to control forideological polarization, parliamentary preference range and duration offormation negotiations. All these variables account for the complexity ofthe bargaining environment, and previous comparative work hasemphasized that they augment the risk of discretionary terminations(King et al. 1990; Warwick 1994). A somewhat different controlvariable pertaining to the parliamentary attributes block is the extremistparty seat share, which is generally believed to influence governmentsurvival negatively, particularly for those minority cabinets that dependon some cooperation with the opposition (King et al. 1990: 858;Warwick 1994: 63).

Political system attributes. In the pooled model I control forbicameralism, positive parliamentarism, semipresidentialism, the constructiveno-confidence vote, the length of the constitutional inter-election period andthe age of democracy. Bicameralism and semipresidentialism introduceadditional veto players in the legislative game, which potentiallydecreases the value of governing and implicitly affects governmentalstability (Druckman and Thies 2002; Schleiter and Morgan-Jones2009). Positive parliamentarism, whether a vote of investiture isrequired or not, is believed to diminish average cabinet duration(Warwick 1994), although some scholars think that the governmentsthat fail to be invested ought to be excluded from the analysis andthat this additional obstacle to formation should actually positivelyinfluence survival chances (Golder 2006b). Another importantinstitution which needs to be accounted for is the constructiveno-confidence vote, which is known to increase government durability.



Many scholars consider that constitutional inter-election periods of morethan four years are associated with higher risks of early elections(Strøm and Swindle 2002). Last but not least, I control in all modelsfor the age of democracy, because previous research (Schleiter andMorgan-Jones 2009: 505) has shown that cabinets in youngerdemocracies face increased risks of both replacement and dissolutionterminations. This variable is particularly important for testing whe-ther there are substantive differences between Western and CentralEastern European cabinets.

Two other institutional controls were added for the modelsanalysing Western European cabinets: prime ministerial powers andthe existence of junior ministers. Formally powerful prime ministersusually have a negative impact on government survival (Damgaard2008: 317), not least because they can decide unilaterally in favour ofdissolution. On the other hand, the existence of the institution ofjunior ministers has the potential to prevent intra-coalition conflictsfrom escalating, particularly when they play a watchdog function(Strøm et al. 2010).

RESEARCH DESIGN

Case Selection

With one exception (Schleiter and Morgan-Jones 2009), the vastliterature on cabinet survival has failed to compare Western andCentral Eastern European governments. In most cases, authors havelimited themselves to underlining the much lower duration rates ofcabinets in the latter region (Conrad and Golder 2010; Somer-Topcuand Williams 2008; Tzelgov 2011). Although data on some covariatesof government durability are still missing for Central and EasternEuropean countries, an integrated test is nevertheless welcome,particularly given the high occurrence of pre-electoral coalitions inthe region. My case selection includes all 102 post-communist coun-tries which joined the European Union up to 2008, the date of thelast cabinet in my sample. Their level of democratic consolidationand similar transitions make them more suitable candidates for suchcomparative analyses than other young post-communist democracies,such as those in the western Balkans, which suffered important disruptionsthroughout the 1990s and later on.



Data

Because the original goal was to have fully comparable samples forWestern and Central and Eastern Europe tests I adopted SonaGolder’s definition of pre-electoral coalition, and coded electoralcoalitions in Central and Eastern Europe accordingly:A pre-electoral coalition exists when multiple parties choose to co-ordinatetheir electoral strategies rather than run for office alone . . . party leaders mayannounce to the electorate that they plan to form a government together ifsuccessful at the polls or they may simply agree to run under a single namewith joint lists or nomination agreements. The common link, though . . . isthat (i) parties never compete in elections as truly independent entities and(ii) the co-ordination of party strategies is made public. (Golder 2006a: 195)

Data of the duration and various characteristics of WesternEuropean cabinets are taken from the Comparative ParliamentaryDemocracy Data Archive (CPDDA)3 which was assembled for thevolume edited by Strøm et al. (2008). Cabinet duration data for the10 Central and Eastern European countries were retrieved mainlyfrom Conrad and Golder (2010).

The information on the cabinets from the 17 Western Europeancountries was matched with data on pre-electoral coalitions estab-lished in these polities in the same period, retrieved from Golder(2006a). I gathered the information on the pre-electoral coalitions inthe post-communist democracies, mainly using online sources suchas the ParlGov database (Döring and Manow 2011), the PARLINEdatabase4 and the ‘Project on Political Transformation and theElectoral Process in Post-Communist Europe’ (Popescu and Hannavy2001). Additional information was taken from the contributions inthe volume edited by Blondel and Müller-Rommel (2001) and thearticle by Conrad and Golder (2010).

In addition, I collected data on the control variables for the institu-tional environment in which the Central and Eastern European cabinetsoperated. All of the 10 Central and Eastern European countries can beincluded in Bergman’s (1993) positive parliamentarism category, due totheir constitutional provisions regulating cabinet investiture votes.Moreover, in four of them (Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia and Slovenia),cabinets need an absolute majority in order to be sworn into office(Ismayr 2010). The effective number of parliamentary parties for eachof the Central and Eastern European legislatures was taken fromGallagher and Mitchell (2008). Finally, I follow Robert Elgie’s defi-nition (1998: 223) of semi-presidentialism.



Methods

The literature on government durability has advanced considerablyon a methodological level since the late 1980s debate between thescholars who argued that the cabinet’s structural attributes mattered(the so-called ‘deterministic approach’ – Strøm 1988) and those whobelieved that governments end because of random critical events(the ‘stochastic approach’ – Browne et al. 1988). The synthesisbetween the two approaches proposed by King and his colleagues(1990) became the new paradigm: survival analysis techniques withhazard rates as functions of, mainly, cabinet attribute variables, pro-vided for more robust and methodologically sound estimations; andsince then they have become the standard techniques (Laver 2003;Saalfeld 2008).

I use the Cox Proportional Hazards (PH) model (Cox 1972),which is particularly suitable for government durability data since itdoes not force the researcher to make any assumption about thedistribution of the hazard function. Proportional hazard is a survivalanalysis regression used to assess net effects of covariates on the ‘timeto’ a termination event – in our case, a cabinet leaving office. I alsouse robust standard errors clustered by country to correct for the eventualstatistical assumption violations (for example, non-independence ofcases) and the particular distortion resulting from the absence of pre-electoral coalitions in five of the Western European systems.

As the different types of pre-electoral coalition-based cabinetscould produce distinct effects corresponding to the kind of termi-nation they had, I used Diermeier and Stevenson’s ‘competing risks’design (1999) and the censoring regime associated with it. Thus, Iestimate three survival analyses, the first corresponding to the gen-eral risk of discretionary cabinet termination (pooled hazards; seealso Saalfeld 2008). For this model all cabinets that terminated due totechnical reasons (such as the death of the prime minister; regularelections) were treated as if the time of their failure was unknownand, more importantly, as if their ‘“real duration” . . . is at least theobserved duration but quite possibly longer’ (Laver 2003: 31).5 Thesecond regression estimates the risk of replacement terminations6 byapplying the above-mentioned treatment not only to all cabinetsterminated due to technical reasons but also to those which endedwith the dissolution of parliament and early elections. Finally, the riskof termination for early elections is estimated by considering that the



failure time was unknown for all governments that ended eithernaturally or through falling victim to changes in party composition,portfolio distribution, through the replacement of the prime ministeror reshuffles.

WHEN, WHERE AND WHAT TYPE OF PRE-ELECTORAL COALITIONSFORM CABINETS?

Overall, there are 125 pre-electoral coalitions included in the govern-ment in the analysed period.7 In the 17 Western European countriesinvestigated, 18.1 per cent of all cabinets were based on such a coalition(74 out of 409). No pre-electoral coalition formed the government inGreece, Finland, Luxemburg, Spain or Great Britain. The correspond-ing proportion of pre-electoral coalition cabinets is almost three timeshigher in the 10 Central and Eastern European countries: 45.1 per cent(51 out of 113), all of them experiencing the situation at least once.

More than half (69) of the pre-electoral coalition-based cabinetsincluded in the data set managed to govern alone, without having todistribute ministerial portfolios to other parties. As can be seen fromthe plotted mean values in Figure 1, the vast majority of these cases(57) were registered in Western Europe.

Roughly two-thirds (43 out of 74) of all the pre-electoral coalitionsincluded in Western cabinets were part of the previous governingcoalition – that is, the cabinet in place before the last legislativeelection. This phenomenon hardly ever happens in Central and EasternEurope, where only five (about 10 per cent) of all pre-electoralcoalitions were made up of incumbent parties.

Figure 2 illustrates the general increase in recent decades in thenumber of cabinets that include pre-electoral coalitions. In WesternEurope this upward trend applies also to the pre-electoral coalitionsthat managed to govern without other partners. In contrast, theaverage number of pre-electoral coalition cabinets resulting fromincumbent governing coalitions seems fairly constant after the smallboost registered in the 1950s. With the addition of the data fromCentral and Eastern European cabinets (the right-hand graph inFigure 2), the overall increase in frequency of pre-electoral coalitioncabinets becomes even more visible. The complete list, including thenumber of cabinets, analysed period and type of cabinets includingpre-electoral coalitions is available in the Appendix.



TYPES OF PRE-ELECTORAL COALITION CABINETS AND THEIRSURVIVAL: A COMPETING RISKS DESIGN

The results of the proportional hazard estimates8 on the pooledsample are presented in Table 1.

The findings generally illustrate the importance of the two types ofpre-electoral coalitions for cabinet survival. The goodness of fit iscomparable with that of most models of government durability.

To start with the pooled hazards model, the hazard ratio forcabinets which replicate electoral alliances perfectly indicates thatthey have a 30 per cent9 smaller rate of discretionary terminations.Conversely, pre-electoral coalitions that had governed in the previouslegislative cycle exhibit a 60 per cent higher risk of discretionarytermination. The latter finding cannot be completely attributed tothe fact that coalition formulas that have survived for a longer periodare simply more prone to die. This is because the ‘incumbent pre-electoral coalition’ variable also includes cabinets that have anenlarged composition – that is, other parties as well as those whichmade up the previous governing coalition.

Figure 1National Variation in Pre-electoral Coalition-based Cabinets and Pre-electoral Coalitions

Governing Alone



The second pooled hazards model10 includes the interaction termaccounting for the effect of pre-electoral coalitions that exclusivelyformed cabinets in Central and Eastern Europe. Although thehazard ratio is smaller, as expected, the interaction is not statisticallysignificant. At the same time, the ‘age of democracy’ variable has arobust effect in both models.

The main effects in the replacement regression are relativelysimilar to those in the regression assessing the general risk of dis-cretionary termination. The most important difference is that ourindicator of pre-electoral coalition cabinets, despite pointing in theexpected direction, failed to acquire statistical significance. Thisfinding corroborates our expectation that the positive effect of pre-electoral coalitions on government durability is less likely to concernreplacement terminations. Holding the other variables constant,cabinets including pre-electoral coalitions that had governed pre-viously are 43 per cent more vulnerable to end with replacementscompared with the rest.

Last but not least, the results of the early election risk regressiondiffer from those of the previous analyses, mainly through the lack of

Figure 2The Frequency of Pre-electoral Coalition Cabinets by the Decade in which they Came to Power



statistical significance of both pre-electoral coalition variables. Forall three models (pooled hazards, replacements and dissolutionhazards) the substantive effects of the pre-electoral coalition variablesremain unaltered when country dummies are included in the model.Overall, these mixed findings emphasize once again the importanceof evaluating separately the hazards associated with the differenttypes of discretionary termination.

Table 1Survival of Pre-electoral Coalitions Governing Alone (Pooled Model – Cox Proportional

Hazard Regressions)

Generalrisk (I)

Generalrisk (II) Replacement

Earlyelection

Pre-electoral coalition governing alone 0.708* 0.893 0.709 0.853(0.131) (0.190) (0.176) (0.240)

Interaction of pre-electoral coalition 0.457governing alone and Central andEastern European cabinet

(0.235)

Incumbent pre-electoral coalition 1.591*** 1.396* 1.432* 1.674(0.270) (0.311) (0.268) (0.811)

Single-party majority cabinet 0.581** 0.593** 0.187*** 1.738(0.127) (0.132) (0.044) (0.715)

Single-party minority cabinet 1.402 1.408 0.931 3.118***(0.327) (0.324) (0.272) (1.313)

Minority coalition 1.343 1.324 1.174 1.565(0.286) (0.277) (0.293) (0.934)

Minimum-winning coalition 0.637*** 0.608*** 0.505*** 1.077(0.109) (0.108) (0.104) (0.354)

Caretaker 3.626*** 3.551*** 1.761* 7.648***(1.091) (1.059) (0.517) (3.161)

Max. government duration 0.979*** 0.979*** 0.998 0.945***(in months) (0.005) (0.005) (0.005) (0.008)

Legislative fragmentation 1.220*** 1.224*** 1.226*** 1.182(0.069) (0.066) (0.079) (0.187)

Bicameral parliament 1.260 1.225 1.117 1.389(0.224) (0.215) (0.198) (0.569)

Positive parliamentarism 1.187 1.235 1.485* 0.936(0.226) (0.229) (0.336) (0.475)

Constructive no-confidence 0.737 0.737 0.802 0.502(0.201) (0.203) (0.246) (0.288)

Semi-presidentialism 0.957 0.954 1.134 0.571(0.125) (0.120) (0.201) (0.220)

Constitutional inter-election period 1.469* 1.444* 1.244 2.028*(in years) (0.300) (0.292) (0.365) (0.813)

Age of democracy 0.990*** 0.989*** 0.984** 0.997(0.003) (0.003) (0.004) (0.008)

N Failing due to risk 332 332 209 123Log-likelihood −1747.477 −1746.282 −1107.045 −590.234Wald χ2 1018.08 894.68 498.13 325.41

Notes: Significance at *p< 0.10; **p< 0.05; ***p< 0.01.Cell entries are hazard ratios; robust, country-clustered standard errors in parentheses.



In an alternative model11 not shown here, the interaction betweenCentral and Eastern European cabinets and the variable capturingthe effect of all pre-electoral coalition-based cabinets (that is, pre-electoral coalitions that governed alone and ‘pre-electoral coalition +others’ formulas) indicated a significant reduction in the risk of earlyelections – a reduction of 65 per cent. However, given the mixedevidence, we cannot corroborate the fourth hypothesis.

Table 2 presents the Cox proportional hazard regression on theWestern European sample, including a larger number of covariatesfor each of the three categories of control variables. The pooledhazards regression illustrates that cabinets based on pre-electoralcoalitions which had governed in the previous cycle have an 81.5 per centhigher chance of suffering from a discretionary termination. Thishappens despite the fact that the dummy variable capturing cabinetsbased exclusively on pre-electoral coalitions seems to have a mildpositive effect on government durability, although not significant atconventional levels.

The main effects tell virtually the same story for the replacementregression. Thus, incumbent pre-electoral coalition cabinets appear twiceas likely as the rest to end with changes in party composition, portfoliodistribution or reshuffles. The other variable, pointing to the pre-electoralcoalitions which govern alone, does not make a significant difference.

The most spectacular finding of the last regression is that for pre-electoral coalition cabinets the risk of early election termination is42 per cent smaller than that of other cabinets, all other things beingequal. This very large positive effect is not reversed for cabinetsincluding incumbent electoral coalitions, with the correspondingvariable failing to reach statistical significance.12

The substantive findings regarding pre-electoral coalition cabinetspresented in Table 2 are not modified significantly by the introduc-tion of country dummies. Moreover, these results are also robust tothe omission of cabinets from countries that never experienced apre-electoral coalition-based cabinet. Similarly, rerunning the modelswithout the observations from the earlier decades (when pre-electoral coalitions were not too common) did not change much.

Controlling for ideologically connected cabinets or leaving out thisvariable does not make a difference for the effects of the pre-electoralcoalition variables. Consequently, at least for the Western Europeandata, we can safely conclude that the relationship between pre-electoralcoalitions and government durability is not a spurious one – that is, it



Table 2Pre-electoral Coalitions and Government Survival in Western Europe

(Cox Proportional Hazard Regressions)

Generalrisk Replacement

Earlyelection

Pre-electoral coalition governing alone 0.801 0.859 0.581*(0.193) (0.356) (0.187)

Incumbent pre-electoral coalition 1.815*** 1.947* 2.418(0.405) (0.671) (1.417)

Single-party majority cabinet 0.812 0.442* 1.655(0.257) (0.193) (0.761)

Single-party minority cabinet 1.448 1.106 2.738***(0.297) (0.409) (1.025)

Minority coalition 1.059 1.234 1.260(0.265) (0.465) (0.421)

Minimum-winning coalition 0.499** 0.374*** 1.053(0.137) (0.140) (0.430)

Caretaker 1.924** 0.968 4.691***(0.507) (0.383) (1.826)

Ideologically connected cabinet 1.206 1.430* 0.938(0.248) (0.275) (0.275)

Max. bargaining power party included 0.411*** 0.412* 0.456***(0.129) (0.199) (0.127)

Max. government duration (in months) 0.967*** 1.002 0.916***(0.008) (0.006) (0.011)

Duration of formation negotiation 0.999 0.997 1.001(0.002) (0.002) (0.007)

Legislative fragmentation 1.134* 1.182 1.257(0.071) (0.141) (0.194)

Ideological polarization 1.023*** 1.021** 1.038**(0.007) (0.009) (0.018)

Parliamentary preference range 0.992* 0.994 0.990*(0.004) (0.005) (0.006)

Extremist party seat share 1.021*** 1.023* 1.018(0.010) (0.012) (0.018)

Bicameral parliament 1.985*** 1.066 5.192***(0.513) (0.320) (2.173)

Positive parliamentarism 2.149*** 2.147** 3.114***(0.508) (0.777) (0.942)

Constructive no-confidence 0.330*** 1.720 0.021***(0.135) (1.046) (0.14)

Semipresidentialism 1.185 1.883* 0.597(0.196) (0.654) (0.217)

Prime ministerial powers 1.114* 0.804*** 1.868***(0.062) (0.051) (0.122)

Junior ministers 0.596** 1.580 0.223***(0.150) (0.480) (0.080)

Constitutional inter-election period (in years) 0.941 1.001 0.495*(0.241) (0.255) (0.196)

Age of democracy 0.995 0.990* 0.993(0.003) (0.006) (0.008)

N failing due to risk 255 142 113Log-likelihood −1244.013 −688.810 −476.271Wald χ2 896.46 1696.31 2119.80

Notes: Significance at *p< 0.10; **p< 0.05; ***p<0.01.Cell entries are hazard ratios; robust, country-clustered standard errors in parentheses.



is not caused by the degree of ideological compatibility between themember parties.

CONCLUSION

This article makes a double contribution to the literature on coalitioncabinets. At a theoretical level I present a number of novel argumentsfor why empirical and formal models of government durability shouldintegrate information on pre-electoral alliances. At an empirical level,the study illustrates the substantial risk-reducing effect that pre-electoralcoalitions governing alone have on discretionary terminations (that is,pooled hazards) in both Western and Central and Eastern Europe. Thispositive relationship is most of the time reversed for the incumbent pre-electoral coalition cabinets. Moreover, it seems that Western cabinetsbased exclusively on pre-electoral coalitions have a much smaller chanceof ending through an early election.

For the Western European cabinets, it could be safely concludedthat the relationship between pre-electoral coalitions and govern-ment durability is not a spurious one, and is not caused by the degreeof ideological compatibility between the member parties. Furtherstudies should aim at replicating the same test for Central andEastern European governments – provided that they are able togather reliable information about policy preferences of memberparties. Nevertheless, the chances that the policy connection drivesthe results are extremely small, given the ideological fuzziness of theregion’s parties (van Biezen 2003; Enyedi and Toka 2007).

The findings presented in this study would greatly benefit from tri-angulation with more qualitative analyses of the mechanisms throughwhich pre-electoral coalitions are replicated into government coalitions(for example, institutional adaptation of electoral coordination com-mittees) and also of the actors’ (party leaders, ministers) perceptionsregarding these transformations and their impact on cabinet life.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The author is grateful to Professor Rudy Andeweg and the two anonymous reviewersfor their valuable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of the article.The author’s work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of National

Education, CNCS-UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2012-4-0644: ‘Re-thinking Indi-vidual Representation: Campaign Personalization and Legislative Behaviour’ (2013–15).



APPENDIXTable 3

Governments and Pre-electoral Coalitions in Europe

CountryAbbreviation

used in Figure 1 Period CabinetsGovernment based onpre-electoral coalition

Pre-electoral coalitiongoverns alone

Pre-electoral coalitiongoverns incumbent

Western EuropeAustria AU 1945–2000 21 14 13 12Belgium BE 1946–99 33 1 1 1Denmark DK 1945–2001 31 1 1 0Finland FN 1948–99 42 0 0 0France FR 1959–2002 23 17 11 8Germany DE 1949–2002 26 13 10 13Great Britain GB 1945–2001 20 0 0 0Greece EL 1977–2000 11 0 0 0Iceland IS 1946–2003 25 1 0 0Ireland IR 1944–2002 22 4 4 0Italy IT 1946–1999 49 3 2 0Luxemburg LX 1954–1999 13 0 0 0Netherlands NL 1946–2002 22 4 3 2Norway NO 1945–2000 26 7 7 3Portugal PT 1976–99 14 4 1 3Spain ES 1977–2000 8 0 0 0Sweden SE 1945–2002 26 5 4 1

Central and Eastern EuropeBulgaria BG 1991–2009 9 3 2 0Czech Republic CZ 1993–2009 10 3 0 0Estonia EE 1992–2009 11 6 2 0Hungary HU 1990–2009 8 4 4 0Latvia LV 1993–2009 16 11 0 2Lithuania LT 1993–2008 11 2 0 1Poland PL 1991–2011 16 4 2 0Romania RO 1992–2009 13 8 1 0Slovakia SK 1993–2010 10 1 1 0Slovenia SL 1993–2011 9 3 0 2

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NOTES

1 An exception to this is Sona Golder’s section (2006b: 126–134), titled ‘Stability ofGovernment Coalitions’, in Chapter 7 of her book. There, she tested the impact of pre-electoral coalitions on government duration, but did so using a much smaller sample anda somewhat limited model specification. Moreover, she tested the effect of pre-electoralpacts only for those cabinets that formed right after elections. Her findings indicate theabsence of a significant positive impact of pre-electoral coalitions on cabinet stability.

2 These are: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania,Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

3 Available at www.pol.umu.se/ccpdand.4 The PARLINE database, produced by the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Geneva, isavailable at http://ipu.org/parline-e/parlinesearch.asp.

5 This follows the right-censoring idea (not the censoring regime itself) of King et al.(1990).

6 Ideally, one would be able to discriminate further within this category, terminationsthat resulted in changes in party composition or changes of portfolio distributionfrom simple reshuffles (replacing ministers with politicians of the same parties).Most likely, the latter are of less substantive interest than the former. Unfortunately,such a differentiation was not possible with the available data.

7 For Western Europe there were also 17 cabinets which included only one memberof the pre-electoral coalition (for example, the 1948 De Gasperi V cabinet in Italy,which included only the Italian Socialist Party, although they had run in a pre-electoralcoalition with the Communists). These cases were coded as 0.

8 The results of bivariate analyses: log-rank and Kaplan–Meier tests are available on request.9 For hazard ratios smaller than 1 it makes more sense to interpret their inverse,following the formula: ‘100% − x’, where ‘x’ is the hazard ratio.

10 Because the ‘pre-electoral coalition governing alone’ variable had no significanteffect for the replacement and early elections models ran on the pooled sample,introducing an interaction term between it and ‘Central and Eastern Europecabinets’ would make no sense from a methodological point of view.

11 The same model presented in Table 1, column 2 with the only difference that ‘pre-electoral coalition governing alone’ variable was replaced by ‘all pre-electoralcoalition-based cabinets’ and the interaction term was modified accordingly.

12 In Sona Golder’s brief analysis (2006b) of the impact of pre-electoral coalitions ongovernment durability in Western Europe, the only statistically significant findingwas that pre-electoral coalitions actually increase the risk of dissolution. The resultspresented here suggest that the finding could have resulted from not controlling forthe effect of incumbent pre-electoral coalitions.

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Early Marriages Last Longer: Pre-electoral Coalitions and Government Survival in Europe

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