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Not all governments survive until the next scheduled election. Some are replaced during their term in office by executives with a different party composition and/or portfolio distribution. Others are able to be 'reborn' as the successor government, undergoing only minimal changes. Such variation has to date received scant attention in studies on government durability. By classifying non-electoral replacements according to the degree of ministerial turnover, this article shows that new cabinets are often similar to their predecessors. It hypothesises that the likelihood of this pattern occurring is greater: when members of the current cabinet face bargaining problems in forming a very different cabinet, as in the case of surplus (unnecessary) parties in oversized coalitions; when the policy distance between the parliamentary median party and the current opposition widens; and when the executive's economic performance discourages opposition parties from forming new coalitions with some incumbent parties. The risk of experiencing different types of replacement is estimated using data on Western European cabinets (1946–2021). Consistent with the hypotheses, the results indicate that governments are able to return to power almost untouched after their termination if they are oversized, if the opposition is far from the legislative median voter, and if inflation grows during a government's tenure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A landmark finding in recent research on electoral behaviour is that voters anticipate the postelection bargaining process among potential members of the governing coalition, and that these anticipated policy agreements inform their vote choice. In this article, this finding is qualified by arguing, and then showing empirically, that when the expected policy change after the elections is marginal or non-existent, ceteris paribus, 'simple' proximity voting should prevail. The argument is tested by using two different but complementary research strategies applied to an individual-level data set constructed from electoral surveys in 28 countries over a 20-year period, and two recent national surveys in which respondents were directly asked to predict the potential coalition government after the elections. Both strategies provide support for the hypothesis and have important implications for the understanding of the consequences of government alternation on voting behaviour and political representation more broadly. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1994843. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]