Full-Power Governments and Caretakers in Parliamentary Democracies, 1945-2020

• In Event: Executive Politics

Abstract

There exists a multiplicity of datasets containing information such as the formation, composition, and termination of parliamentary cabinets. Unfortunately, these datasets are not in agreement regarding basic facts. Such disparities cast a shadow of uncertainty over the accumulated findings of the large body of research on government formation and termination in parliamentary systems. The reason for this is, in part, that existing datasets are committed to a specific definition of "government," which prevents them from accommodating the country-specific variation in constitutional rules and practices that is characteristic of parliamentarism. In this article, we introduce a new dataset of parliamentary events covering 34 democracies between 1945 and 2020. In it, we record a series of events related to government formation and termination and place them on a timeline for each country. The events for each country vary, and the timeline on which they are placed can be partitioned into discrete segments according to the needs of specific research projects. The dataset is, therefore, flexible enough to accommodate the institutional heterogeneity we find in parliamentary democracies. We illustrate how the dataset can be used by distinguishing between "full-power" governments and "caretaker" administrations. We show that, on average, the time to form a government has increased since WWII, although this increase has not been as dramatic as recent formations in certain countries have led many to believe.

Authors

• Francesco Bromo, University of Oxford

• Jose Antonio Cheibub, University of Pittsburgh