Institutional Design and Party Government in Post-Communist Europe by Csaba Nikolenyi

Author:Csaba Nikolenyi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

2) change in prime minister;

3) resignation of the government when followed by the re-formation of the same cabinet;

4) a general election.

As for the unit of time, cabinet duration is measured by the actual number of days. When a cabinet ends because of a general election, I take a date of the election as the end of the cabinet’s tenure in office. The start date of each cabinet is the day when it was offcially invested in office either by appointment of the head of state or by a parliamnetary vote of investiture.

Table 6.1 shows the average duration of all cabinets in each of the ten states. The Table also distinguishes two types of governments; those that are formed immediately after a general election and those that are formed later in the term. The last row of the Table shows that the overall duration of post-communist cabinets is very short: the average duration of the 106 cabinets is only 551 days with post-election cabinets lasting almost exactly twice as long as cabinets that are formed later in the term (790 versus 382 days). However, there is variation among the ten states. Specifically, it is worth noting that in three states (Czech Republic, Lithuania, and Romania), mid-term cabinets last a little longer on average than cabinets that are formed immediately after the general election. In the case of the Czech Republic the difference is small, however in the other two states the difference is 100 days or more.

Table 6.1 provides strong preliminary evidence in favor of the view that the institutional foundations of power dispersion matter for the relative duration of governments. As we move down from the first to the third group of states, i.e. as we move from lower to greater degrees of institutional power dispersion, average cabinet duration clearly drops. The last column of Table 6.1 shows that the average number of days a cabinet lasts in the first group is 701 followed by 509.08 in the second and 473.96 in the third group. We find the same order in the second (p.109)

Table 6.1 Cabinet duration in post-communist democracies, 1990–2010

State

Post-election cabinets

Mid-term cabinets

All cabinets

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.