Rising Hazards: An Underlying Dynamic of Parliamentary Government

This paper undertakes a quantitative examination of underlying rates of government termination in West European parliamentary systems. Most previous research assumed that these rates remain constant over the lifetimes of governments, but this assumption has never been subjected to careful scrutiny. A variety of tests is performed on a new data set that covers 16 systems over the 1945-89 period, each of which points to a general tendency for the of termination or hazard rate to increase with the length of time a government remains in power. This information is incorporated into an empirical model of government survival that also includes ideological/policy differences within governments and the impact of economic trends.