Government formation and termination in European democracies with presidential heads of state

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of Political Science, 2008.In most European democracies, a government can form and stay in office based on a continuous process of bargaining and negotiation among parliamentary parties constrained by the set of institutional arrangements that governs the process, since a parliamentary majority can remove the government from office at any time of its tenure. The primary goal of this dissertation is to study the role and influence of presidential heads of state in the government formation and termination processes in European democracies. How to form and sustain a viable coalition in a multiparty parliament where there is no single majority party has been one of the most intensively studied subjects of comparative politics. However, the role and influence of the heads of state in these important democratic processes has been neglected in the literature even if the heads of state are elected presidents. In particular, the dissertation focuses on the president’s constitutional power to select a formateur who makes a proposal for a prospective government over which negotiations take place within parliamentary parties when an opportunity to form a new government arises and the power to call or not to call an election when the incumbent government loses the confidence of parliament before the parliament completes its full constitutional term. Focusing on these constitutionally endowed powers of the presidents, the dissertation derives a number of theoretical hypotheses that link the preference of the presidents to the outcomes of bargaining processes and tests them against the real world data. The dissertation shows with strong evidence that the presidents in European democracies have used their constitutionally endowed powers effectively to advance their political interests through the formation and maintenance of their preferred governments in multiparty parliamentary environments. Researchers in the field of comparative politics have often focused on the broad contrast in constitutional designs, such as parliamentarism and presidentialism. The dissertation, thus, suggests that there are significant limitations to such an aggregate approach. The dissertation generates new insights on the mechanisms through which important political actors – e.g., the government, the parliament, and the president – interact with each other to affect the national policy makings under diverse institutional arrangements