In Part I we described the background to the making and breaking of governments in parliamentary democracies. In Part II we developed and elaborated a theoretical model of this process. We move on in Part III to apply our model in a systematic way to the real world of government formation. In Chapters 7, 8, and 9 we describe an extensive empirical investigation of the model in a wide range of government formation situations in postwar Western Europe. Before we do this, however, in order to get a feel for what is going on and to understand what we need to do before we can apply the model to the real world, we look here at two particular cases from our dataset in some detail – Germany in 1987, and Ireland in 1992–1993. We make no claim that these examples are typical of government formation in parliamentary democracies. We have chosen them for purely didactic purposes: Each case allows us to elaborate a number of key features of our model in a relatively simple context. A more systematic empirical analysis of the universe of such cases appears in subsequent chapters.

GERMANY 1987

Our model of cabinet government uses information about a number of features of the party system to determine whether there are equilibrium allocations of cabinet portfolios between parties, and to identify these if they exist. The basic pieces of information that are needed are the number of legislative seats controlled by each party and the number of legislative votes needed to pass a motion of no confidence (between them these determine the decisive structure); the policy positions of each party on each salient dimension of policy; and the cabinet portfolio with jurisdiction over this policy dimension.