Table 2: Determinants of the Duration of Government Bargaining Delays
Dependent Variable: Number of Days Needed to Form a Government
Independent Variables
All Formations
Inter-Election Period
Post-Election Period
Weibull
Cox
Weibull
Cox
Weibull
Cox
Uncertainty
Post-election
-0.97***
-0.98***
(0.13)
(0.13)
Bargaining Complexity
Legislative Parties
-0.26***
-0.26***
-0.14
-0.12
-0.38***
-0.43***
(0.06)
(0.06)
(0.10)
(0.10)
(0.07)
(0.08)
Ideological Polarization
-1.01***
-1.01***
-0.78
-0.47
-1.42***
-1.64***
(0.39)
(0.39)
(1.08)
(1.00)
(0.43)
(0.45)
Positive Parliamentarism
-0.12
-0.10
-0.31
-0.30
0.03
0.04
(0.13)
(0.13)
(0.26)
(0.26)
(0.16)
(0.17)
Electoral Coalition
-0.01
-0.02
(0.14)
(0.14)
Controls
Majority Party
0.81***
0.82***
0.72**
0.69**
0.84***
0.91***
(0.17)
(0.17)
(0.31)
(0.32)
(0.20)
(0.21)
Continuation Rule
1.43***
1.47***
1.02***
1.02***
1.82***
2.04***
(0.17)
(0.17)
(0.33)
(0.34)
(0.21)
(0.23)
ρ (shape parameter)
1.31***
1.25***
1.38***
(0.07)
(0.09)
(0.09)
Log Likelihood
-427.29
-1480.08
-167.38
-463.41
-255.28
-814.54
Observations
325
325
124
124
201
201
* p<0.10; ** p<0.05; *** p<0.01 (two-tailed).
NOTES: Weibull and Cox proportional hazards estimates; robust standard errors in parentheses. A test using
Schoenfeld residuals indicates that the proportional hazards assumption is not violated in any of the models. The
Efron method is employed for handling ties in the Cox model. Data are based on cabinets from the 16 countries
(excluding France) shown in table 1 between 1944 and 1998.
complexity such as the number of parties and ideological polarization in the legislature do seem to signif-
icantly increase the length of time that it takes a government to form in post-election periods. Evidence
for this comes from the negative and significant coefficients on L
EGISLATIVE
P
ARTIES
and I
DEOLOGICAL
P
OLARIZATION
in columns 5 and 6. While this illustrates that these two variables affect the duration of
the government formation process in the predicted way, it is natural to ask whether these effects are sub-
stantively meaningful. Precisely how much longer in days does it take to form a government if I increase
the effective number of legislative parties by one standard deviation above its mean? What if I increase
18
Convention