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In this paper we present a structural approach to the study of government formation in multi-party parliamentary democracies. The approach is based on the estimation of a stochastic bargaining model which we use to investigate the effects of specific institutional features of parliamentary democracy on the formation and stability of coalition governments. We then apply our methodology to estimate the effects of governmental bicameralism. Our main findings are that eliminating bicameralism does not affect government durability, but does have a significant effect on the composition of governments leading to smaller coalitions. These results are due to an equilibrium replacement effect: removing bicameralism affects the relative durability of coalitions of different sizes which in turn induces changes in the coalitions that are chosen in equilibrium.

▪ Abstract  This review deals with the making and breaking of governments in "minority legislatures" in which no political party controls a majority of seats. It looks at both a priori and empirical approaches to analyzing government formation, at the application of both cooperative and noncooperative game-theoretic models, and at the impact of both office-seeking and policy-seeking assumptions about the motivations of politicians. Substantive themes covered include the partisan composition of both minority and majority cabinets, the allocation of cabinet portfolios between parties, and the duration of cabinets in minority legislatures. The way forward in this field is identified in terms of the need for more dynamic models that see government formation as a complex system within the broader context of party competition as a whole, and for models that take fundamental account of intraparty politics in their description of the strategic behavior of political parties.

Analyzes data on over 30,000 potential governments drawn from 220 coalition bargaining situations in 14 post-war democracies in a multivariate statistical model. Role of size, ideology, and institutions.