Government duration is an extensively researched topic in political science. According to a well-known theoretical perspective (the ‘attributes approach’), the longevity of cabinets is determined by the same – legislative- or executive-level – factors that typically explain their formation (e.g. government size and the distribution of ideological preferences in the parliament and in the cabinet) (Strøm 1985). Following another renowned perspective (the ‘events approach’), cabinet duration is primarily affected by a set of ‘shocks’ that occur during the tenure and may perturb the equilibrium reached at the time of government formation (Browne, Frendreis & Gleiber 1984, 1986). These two approaches have been fruitfully combined into a ‘unified’ account of government survival (King et al. 1990; Warwick 1994). In this literature, very limited attention has been paid to the role of institutions such as the conflict resolution mechanisms employed by coalition parties in most multi-party governments. The comparative research on coalition governance has emphasized the crucial task these mechanisms perform in mitigating intra-coalition divergence and allowing coalition members to make joint policy (Strøm, Müller & Bergman 2008; Martin & Vanberg 2011; Carrol & Cox 2012). In this paper we assess how government survival in parliamentary democracies can be affected by the use of long-established institutional instruments designed to help coalition partners to govern together. To this purpose, we use data on the use of coalition governance instruments covering Western European democracies since the end of the Second World War.