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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]

In bicameral parliaments, upper chambers amend the bills that have been passed by lower chambers, and sometimes bills that are passed in one chamber never become law and just 'die' in the other. Why does one chamber fail or refuse to anticipate what the other will do? What can lead the political actors in one chamber to 'waste' their time and resources on a bill that will be never approved as law? How can we explain the variations in the number of such 'useless' approvals? This article helps answer these questions by focusing on 'useless approvals' in the Italian parliament (1979–2018). Italy offers an ideal setting to analyse this phenomenon, with two houses holding the same powers but characterised by varying degrees of political incongruence over time. We found that differences in preference between the two chambers positively affect the chances of useless approvals, above all for private members' bills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2014 European elections were characterized in many countries by growing support for Eurosceptic parties. This growth was not uniform and not clearly associated with the economic performance of these member states. In this article, we investigate the role played in the 2014 European Parliament elections by a country-specific factor – the composition of government coalitions – different from economic performance. In particular, we argue that in those countries where moderately Eurosceptic parties were more involved in the government, citizens with negative attitudes toward the European Union were more likely to vote for highly Eurosceptic parties. This was especially the case when the governments also included strongly pro-EU parties. The empirical analysis, which is based upon the 2014 European Election Voter Study, the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, and the Parliaments and Governments database, confirms our hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on committees in multiparty legislatures in parliamentary democracies focuses on their role in solving intra-cabinet delegation problems. Using a straightforward spatial model, this article discusses how committees can also solve uncertainty problems that arise in settings characterised by unstable coalitions, weak governmental agenda control and a lack of government change. In order to explore empirically how committees solve these problems, the article focuses on the success (and later decline) over the last 30 years of the sede legislativa, a law-making procedure that formalises ‘universalism’ in Italian legislative committees. The statistical results largely confirm the theoretical expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars interested in legislative processes pay relatively little attention to the changes made to bills in parliamentary democracies. On the one hand, comparative research has often described parliamentary institutions as ineffectual vis-à-vis cabinets throughout the lawmaking process; on the other hand, for a long time the rational choice literature has focused more on the formal rules regulating amendatory activity than on amendatory activity itself. Hence, very few studies have tried to explain how much government bills are altered in parliament and why. This article investigates the changes made to governmental legislation in Italy. Taking the modifications occurring during the legislative process as the dependent variable, a number of explanatory hypotheses derived from both existing scholarship and original arguments are discussed and tested. This also allows the identification of some usually unobserved aspects of the decision-making process within the cabinet. The findings can also be relevant for comparative research since Italy has been characterised during the period under scrutiny (1987-2006) by two distinct electoral systems, two extremely different party systems (pivotal and alternational), governments with various ideological orientations and range, and both partisan and technical ministers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The large literature on legislative party unity identifies the confidence relationship, i.e. the threat of being voted out of office and losing agenda setting powers, as well as cabinet membership, as two crucial institutional sources of party discipline. However, by focusing on the dramatic change in the Italian political system following the 1994 election, the article shows that the impact of these factors on party unity (and the direction of this impact) hinge crucially on the possibility of government alternation rather than mere cabinet turnover. This is illustrated by an index of party unity that explicitly focuses on the behaviour of individual MPs derived from a roll-call analysis of the Italian Chamber of Deputies during the period 1988–2008. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent studies of the legislative process have put forward a number of plausible hypotheses regarding the distribution of agenda-setting power. These hypotheses have guided scholars in identifying those conflicts and actors that are crucial to explaining legislative change and the wording of legislation. However, this has not yet led to a better understanding of the choice of specific agenda-setting rules. Why does the cabinet in some parliamentary democracies enjoy an undisputed role, while in others the parliament continues to play the role of co-protagonist? This article attempts to answer this question by looking at some well-known features of party systems. It is argued that in pivotal party systems, with limited government alternation, it is much more difficult to strengthen the government vis-à-vis the parliament. One factor prevents the procedural and institutional predominance of the cabinet under these circumstances: the lack of opportunities for, and expectations of, large and controversial policy change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]