Intra-Party Politics in the Context of Government Survival

Inherently, all political players must ensure that their preferences are sufficiently represented in the outcome during bargaining. However, emphasizing the ideological distance between cabinet parties is only one side of the coin. What has been ignored so far is that bargaining occurs between political players but also within them.

The present doctoral thesis contributes to this research gap by appending partisan theory by an intra-party perspective. Therefore, it emphasizes the relevance of cohesion – as similarity of ideological preferences within political parties - as crucial for government survival. Further, it argues that cohesion within parties enables the latter to act unified and be less susceptible to expulsion through other actors. Therefore, acting cohesively contributes to higher utility extraction and a stronger impact on political outcomes.

Several studies have examined the puzzle of varying lengths of governmental terms between countries. The present volume contributes to this research tradition in two regards. First, it offers a new theoretical approach for explaining government duration by considering intra-party preference structures as a determinant for government survival. Second, it applies a new measurement for government duration and develop a completely new and innovative measurement for government cohesion. In so doing, the study advances our knowledge about party behavior and its impact on macro-comparative phenomena such as differences in government duration.