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Government instability and the state

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2018

Daniel Walther ,
Johan Hellström  and
Torbjörn Bergman
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Abstract

Government instability (cabinet duration) is an important feature of parliamentary democracy. Over time, the research on cabinet duration has improved in technical and theoretical sophistication. However, we note that little attention has been paid to the relationship between governments and the state itself. Our main hypothesis is that state capacity, e.g., factors such as state bureaucratic effectiveness and law and order, shape how easy it is for governments to implement the new policy and thus how well they can achieve policy objectives. We also argue that when state capacity is low, the ability to adequately respond to external shocks goes down, and instability increases. When testing this empirically we find that low state capacity does indeed help us predict an increased risk for early termination—in particular, whether the government ends through a replacement (but not by an early election). Using interaction effects, we also demonstrate that the effect of external shocks, such as an increase in unemployment, is conditional on state capacity. An increase in unemployment only has a significant effect on cabinet stability when state capacity is low, suggesting that the cabinet’s (in)ability to address the economic problems is an important factor for understating cabinet durability.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , July 2019 , pp. 579 - 594
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2018 

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Footnotes

*

Daniel Walther is an Assistant Professor ([email protected]), Johan Hellström is an Associate Professor ([email protected]) and Torbjörn Bergman, is a Professor ([email protected]) in the Department of Political Science, Umeå University, Umeå 901 87, Sweden. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation (Research grant MMW 2011.0030) that made this research possible. The authors also thank the anonymous reviewers of this journal. To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2018.20

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