British Journal of Political Science

Table of Contents - 1998 - Volume 28, Issue 04  


The Duration of Cabinet Formation Processes in Western Multi-Party Democracies

DANIEL  DIERMEIER  a1 and PETER  VAN ROOZENDAAL  a2 1
a1 F. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, North Western University
a2 Netherlands Court of Audit, The Hague

Abstract

Strategic models of coalition bargaining formation have demonstrated the importance of institutional features for an understanding of cabinet formation in West European democracies. Yet little is know about the empirical regularities of government formation processes. In this article we analyse the duration of formation processes using a semi-parametric estimation procedure on a dataset of 304 government formations in thirteen multi-party democracies. The results are consistent with a bargaining approach under incomplete information.


Footnotes

1 The authors are grateful to Bert Molewijk and Andre Herbrink for research assistance, as well as David Baron, Nolan McCarty, Keith Krehbiel, Randy Stevenson and Robert Wilson for helpful comments. They also thank Kaare Strom for allowing them to use his data.