Electoral Systems, Party System Fragmentation and Government Instability

Abstract

This chapter examines the empirical relationship between electoral systems, party system characteristics, cabinet stability and the fate of pluralist democracy in interwar Europe. Its main objective is to test basic notions in a literature which has been characterized by Lawrence Mayer (1980b: 335) as follows:

The collapse of parliamentary democracies in Europe prior to World War II generated a search for the internal weakness of such systems. Out of this search came a suggestion from several quarters that multiparty parliamentary democracies were more prone to cabinet instability than were two-party systems. Parliamentary democracies, beset with such cabinet instability, cannot govern effectively. Therefore, it was suggested, such unstable systems were readily replaced by more authoritarian political regimes that appeared better able to provide for the efficient functioning of that system.