Government Survival in Parliamentary Democracies

by Paul Warwick

Why do some parliamentary democracies, such as Britain, manage to produce highly durable governments, whereas others, such as Italy, are marked by instability? While Britain's "Westminster model" garners public confidence in and respect for the model, the contrasting record of what is essentially the same regime model in Italy more often elicits criticism and ridicule. Through a wide-ranging quantitative investigation, this book seeks to unravel the puzzling, Janus-faced nature of parliamentary democracy and answer a central question of contemporary political science: what determines how long governments survive in parliamentary democracies? Government survival is important because it constitutes an essential component of the overall functioning of parliamentary democracies. It is also closely associated with the introduction to the discipline of event history analysis, a highly promising statistical methodology. The investigation utilizes this methodology on the most comprehensive dat