ELECTION TIMING IN CONSENSUAL SYSTEMS. LINKING COALITION BARGAINING AND VALENCE THEORY OF PARTY COMPETITION

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the determinants of cabinet termination in parliamentary systems. A preliminary study will raise a fundamental question: do voters punish incumbents for calling anticipated elections? The scarce evidence available reached contradictory conclusions. For the first time in the literature I will link cabinet termination with valence theories of party competition, and I will individuate the determinants of this popularity cost. My valece theory will provide a solution to the existing debate, showing that all the findings provided up to now represent specific cases of a more general phenomenon. The core of my thesis is represented by a coalition bargaining model. In each stage of the game, incumbents observe their electoral expectations and choose between negotiating on public policies, forming a new cabinet with the opposition, and calling elections. My game will show a series of improvements: first, it will introduce time and account for its effects on the outcome of the negotiation; second, it will introduce spatial considerations, such as the ideological location of the players and their coalition opportunities; third, it will encompass a theoretical account of the popularity cost of opportunistic election calling. Its fundamental assumptions will then be tested. Its asumptions will be tested using voting intention trends from four European democracies, covering more than fifty years of parliamentary politics. Results will show that variations in the exit option for the governing parties efficiently explain the likelihood of cabinet termination. On consensual democracies, this kind of test had never been conducted before. A corollary research concludes the dissertation: if voting intention data can be used to explain cabinet termination, then the same data can be used to account for ministerial tenure. The dismissal of ministers, or alterations in their prerogatives, can be described as a currency in the power game among coalition partners. Such an hypothesis had never been tested before. Using duration analysis I will show how imbalances in incumbent parties' popularity are associated with more frequent redistributions of power withing the goverment coalition. Even in this case, my empirical models will include time-varying covariates, producing an empirical contribution to the literature.