Making and Breaking Governments: Cabinets and Legislatures in Parliamentary Democracies

Making and Breaking Governments offers a theoretical argument about how parliamentary democracy works. The authors formulate a theoretical model of how parties create new governments and either maintain them in office or, after a resignation or no-confidence vote, replace them. The theory involves strategic interaction, derives consequences, formulates empirical hypotheses on the basis of these, and tests the hypotheses with data drawn from the postwar European experience with parliamentary democracy.