The Cabinet Stability Controversy: New Perspectives on a Classic Problem

Empirical research into cabinet stability or duration has bifurcated into two contending streams: the approach, which explains duration with attributes or causal factors, and the events approach, which models the phenomenon as a process of random cabinet collapses. Recently, a unified model has been proposed that uses maximum likelihood estimation to combine the two. In this article we demonstrate that the cabinet duration phenomenon is more complex than the unified model allows for, and we develop an alternative research strategy and model.