Termination of parliamentary governments: revised definitions and implications

Abstract

The literature on government coalitions uses a common definition of when governments terminate and new ones form. This terminology is convenient and has served empirical coalitions studies quite well. This article challenges this terminology on the ground that it risks inflating the number of governments and, at least in some countries, severely distorts scholarly understanding of government duration and durability. Specifically, this article criticises the definitional condition that any partisan change in the composition of a government signifies its termination. The article demonstrates how using more precise definitions affects government duration considerably in a number of countries. In some cases, countries experience short-lived governments because minor partisan changes take place within a surplus coalition. Given these observations, the article re-visits the finding that minimum winning governments survive longer than oversized governments. When applying the modified definitions, differences in duration between these two types of majority coalitions almost disappear.