S ome European constitutions give cabinets great discretion to manage their own demise, whereas others limit their choices and insert the head of state into decisions about government termination. In this article, we map the tremendous variation in the constitutional rules that govern cabinet termination and test existing expectations about its effects on a government's survival and mode of termination. In doing so, we use the most extensive government survival data set available to date, the first to include East and West European governments. Our results demonstrate that constitutional constraints on governments and presidential influence on cabinet termination are much more common than has previously been understood and have powerful effects on the hazard profiles of governments. These results alter and improve the discipline's understanding of government termination and durability, and have implications for comparative work in a range of areas, including the survival and performance of democracies, electoral accountability, opportunistic election calling, and political business cycles.The Queen can hardly now refuse a defeated minister the chance of a dissolution any more than she can dissolve in the time of an undefeated one, and without his consent. (Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, 1872, 329) [L]e droit de dissolution est une des prérogatives personnelles du Président de la République . . . ce droit s'exerce pratiquement sans limitation . . . (Maurice

In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of the effect of opportunistic elections on the incumbent's electoral performance. The existing literature on parliamentary dissolution and election timing generates contradictory expectations about the ability of incumbent governments to benefit from strategically timed elections. We evaluate these competing hypotheses, drawing on an original dataset of 321 parliamentary elections in 27 East and West European countries, observed from 1945 or democratization to the present. In order to causally identify the effect of opportunistic election calling on incumbent's electoral performance, we rely on instrumental variable regression. Our results reveal that opportunistic election calling generates a significant vote share bonus for the incumbent of as much as 5.5 percentage points. This finding suggests that by timing elections strategically, governments can significantly affect how voters vote. It therefore has powerful implications for our understanding the effectiveness of elections as instruments of democracy and accountability.

Assembly dissolution is a key dimension of constitutional variation in parliamentary democracies. It conditions the timing of elections, influences electoral accountability, and shapes how politicians bargain about government formation, termination, and policy. Yet, despite the importance of dissolution rules, no measure exists that applies to the different actors involved in dissolutions and records the complexity of the rules sufficiently accurately to capture their substantive implications. This article develops, operationalizes, and tests a detailed index of parliamentary dissolution powers that generalizes to all relevant actors. We demonstrate the substantive utility of the index by examining how election timing powers modify electoral accountability.

Control over government portfolios is the key to power over policy and patronage, and it is commonly understood to lie with parties in European democracies. However, since the democratic transitions of the 1990s, Europe has had nearly equal numbers of parliamentary and semi‐presidential regimes, and there is evidence that the ability of parties to control government posts in these two regime types differs. As yet, political scientists have a limited understanding of the scale and causes of these differences. In this article a principal‐agent theoretical explanation is proposed. Data are examined on 28 parliamentary and semi‐presidential democracies in Europe that shows that differences in party control over government portfolios cannot be understood without reference to the underlying principal‐agent relationships between voters, elected politicians and governments that characterise Europe's semi‐presidential and parliamentary regimes.

This article develops an account of who controls Europe’s semipresidential cabinets politically. The authors ask which actors negotiate cabinet composition and what shapes who is in charge of the cabinet—questions that have been the focus of key debates about the political consequences of this regime type since Duverger. This article proposes and tests a principal—agent account of semipresidential governments as controlled by the president and assembly parties whose constitutional and electoral authority and ability to act on behalf of the voters critically shapes their influence on the government. The authors test their argument using data on 218 cabinets in 13 Eastern and Western European semipresidential regimes (1945—2005).