Abstract
This chapter shifts the focus to governments. Starting from Mair’s concepts of closure and openness, we analyze trends and variations in governmental properties such as alternation, innovation, and formula. We find that the governmental arena seems to tell a somewhat different story compared to the electoral and parliamentary ones. Here, a certain degree of fluidity had always existed, even in times when the interparty competition for votes and parliamentary seats was frozen. However, a clear deinstitutionalization process is not detectable, not even in the last decade, although some signs of increasing openness are emerging. It seems that the change emerged in the 2010s in the electoral arena has yet to reach Rokkan’s threshold of ‘executive power’.
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Notes
- 1.
In Anglo-Saxon countries and especially in the United Kingdom, cabinet refers to the executive body, while government refers broadly to executive power and activity, also including the parliamentary majority. In the rest of Western Europe, the two terms tend to overlap and are used synonymously, which is also the choice of this work.
- 2.
As a result, a total of 632 cabinets have been taken into account.
- 3.
Similarly, Casal Bértoa and Enyedi (2016, 266) argue that ‘the seizure of governmental power is the principal, even if not the only, prize of party competition’.
- 4.
With the exception of his 2007 work, where he also proposed a fourth indicator, as discussed in the previous section.
- 5.
Familiar formulas design the governing formulas among the parties within the ‘cartel’ (Kats & Mair, 1995).
- 6.
Unlike Casal Bértoa and Enyedi (2016), we based our calculation on ministerial positions (seats) instead of ministers because our emphasis is on governmental positions, not persons. In this way, if a politician holds two ministries in the same cabinet, it contributes twice to the share of seats of his/her own party. Notice that only the minister positions have been considered, while the deputy minister and undersecretary positions have been excluded. The methodological choices concerning the rules for calculating volatility (e.g., splits and mergers) are exactly the same as those used in Chapter 3. The share of seats held by independent ministers has been included in the calculation of volatility be comparing it across time as it was an individual party, regardless of the identity of the technical ministers.
- 7.
GAlt = (50 − |TGV − 50|)*2 where TGV = \(\frac{{\sum_{i = 1}^n | p_{it -} p_{i\left( {t + 1} \right)|} }}{2}\) where n is the number of parties and pi represents the percentage of ministerial seats obtained by that party in time periods t and t + 1.
- 8.
GInn = \(\mathop \sum \nolimits_{i = 1}^n p_{i\left( {t + 1} \right)}\) where n is the number of parties and pi represents the percentage of ministerial seats gained by that party at t + 1. The same rules followed in Chapters 3 and 4 for calculating new parties apply also here (see also Emanuele, 2016; Emanuele & Chiaramonte, 2019).
- 9.
Like the formation of the coalition between the social-democrats (SDP) and the liberal-democrats (FDP) in Germany in 1969. Both parties had governed before, but they had never done this together. Moreover, note that the first fully technocratic government (i.e., a cabinet made exclusively by independent ministers, without the presence of any political party)—if any—in a given country has been considered an innovative formula. The calculation of Formula starts from the first government of the second legislature, thus taking all cabinets in office in the first legislature as a reference for familiarity.
- 10.
Note that GAlt and Formula have 375 observations instead of 376 (like TV and TPV, see Chapter 3) as democratic governments in Portugal starts in 1976 and therefore the first legislature considered here is that starting in 1979. Conversely, for TV and TPV we also have the 1976 data point as it is comparable with the 1975 Constituent Assembly election. Consistently with EInn and PInn, GInn has only 356 observations as its calculation starts from the third legislature of each country, thus taking the first two legislatures as reference (see also Morlino, 1998).
- 11.
On average, in the 20 countries under study, 1.73 cabinets have taken place for each legislature.
- 12.
In our dataset, the Cronbach’s alpha is 0.47, while Pearson’s r correlation is 0.01 between GAlt and GInn, 0.27 between GAlt and Formula, and 0.56 between GInn and Formula. A principal component analysis shows that only the first component has an eigenvalue above 1, which means that the three measures are structured around one principal component.
- 13.
Moreover, these six legislatures account for 35.6% of the total amount of GInn in the data.
- 14.
In the panel-corrected standard error regression with country fixed effect, Formula is significant at p < 0.1 if we consider the full dataset (N = 375) but it increases to p < 0.01 if we simply exclude the first legislature for which we have information in each country (N = 356).
- 15.
In Greece and the United Kingdom substantial access to new parties (GInn is, respectively, 7.11 and 6.45 on average) seems to lower the predictability of the party system. However, by going into detail, we notice that the high GInn is mostly due to a single legislature (1981–1985 in Greece and 1951–1955 in the United Kingdom), characterized by the first alternation in government of, respectively, the PASOK and the Conservative Party (GInn = 100). With these important exceptions, access to new parties is a rare event in both countries. Specifically, in Greece, ‘with the minor and short-lived exception of the so-called “ecumenical” coalitions (between July 1989 and February 1990 as well as November 2011 and February 2012), between 1974 and 2011 governmental changes were always wholesale (i.e. complete or no change in government composition), extremely familiar governmental formulae (either the conservative ND, or the socialist PASOK), and the number of parties with a chance of forming a government limited exclusively to these two’ (Casal Bértoa, 2019, 571–573).
- 16.
Italy’s GInn since 1994 is even higher than Spain’s, even though Spain appears in Table 5.1 as the country showing, on average, the highest governmental innovation in Western Europe (GInn = 14.92). However, in Spain, the access of new parties to government has only occurred three times, all signaling relevant events in the country’s history: the first alternation in government of PSOE (1982), PP (1996), and the entry of Podemos into the center-left coalition with the PSOE after the November 2019 election.
- 17.
We should note that we are considering legislatures, not single cabinets, so all types can take place in principle. Indeed, while in a single cabinet we cannot have a familiar formula and the presence of new parties, in a legislature with multiple cabinets we can have a weighted average Formula below the mean (and hence ‘familiar’) due to the presence of more familiar than innovative cabinets in the legislature, and GInn above the mean (with the entry of new parties in other cabinets of the same legislatures).
- 18.
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Appendix
Appendix
See Figs. 5.6, 5.7, 5.8, and 5.9.
Evolution of GAlt, Ginn, and Formula over time in Western Europe, linear and quadratic fit
Trend of GAlt by country, Western Europe (1946–2019)
Trend of GInn by country, Western Europe (1946–2019)
Trend of Formula by country, Western Europe (1946–2019)
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Chiaramonte, A., Emanuele, V. (2022). Interparty Competition in the Governmental Arena. In: The Deinstitutionalization of Western European Party Systems. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97978-2_5
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