17:45 - 20:00
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Janina Beiser-McGrath
Discussant/s:
Torun Dewan
Meeting Room F

Christine Sylvester, Julia Maynard
The Spurious Relationship between Party Leader Resignations and their Votes

Janina Beiser-McGrath, Anja Osei
Can I stay or must I go? Cabinet replacement in Africa

Despina Alexiadou
Cabinet reshuffles: how bad are they for expertise and policy?

Ebru Ece Özbey
Populist Contagion in the House of Commons: A Comparative Study of PMQs from Blair to May

Maria Thürk, Heike Klüver
The electoral implications of minority cabinets
The electoral implications of minority cabinets
Maria Thürk 1, Heike Klüver 2
1 University og Basel
2 Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Does supporting a minority cabinet hurt a party electorally? Even though minority governments have become more and more frequent in recent years, little is known about the electoral implications of parties under minority cabinets. We argue that acting as a support party of a minority government allows parties to achieve important policy goals while not having to suffer from electoral losses that typically come with joining cabinets as junior coalition partners. While support parties obtain policy payoffs in selected policy areas in exchange for their parliamentary support, they can avoid electoral punishment as they are not formally part of the government. In order to test our theoretical argument, we have compiled a novel and comprehensive dataset on the electoral performance of more than 200 political parties running in 196 elections in 27 countries from 1980 until 2019. Using a differences-in-differences estimation strategy, we estimate the causal effect of minority support party status on subsequent electoral performance. Our findings shed important light on the relationship between minority governments and electoral competition in times of increasing party system fragmentation.