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Category: Project

Description: In parliamentary democracies the survival of a government is primarily dependent on its legislative majority. A high level of disagreement across and within government parties can lead to legislative stalemate and early dissolution of the parliament. This paper provides a new approach to capture legislative conflict dynamically across the electoral term. We use topic modelling and the scaling method Wordscores to estimate the disagreement across government parties in legislative debate over time. We analyse two German coalition governments that were faced with votes of confidence in 2001 and 2005, namely Chancellor Schröder’s cabinets composed of Social Democrats and Greens. We assume two specific policy areas (‘defence’ and ‘labour market/social policy’) to be substantial in describing the main conflict lines that led to life-threatening government crises. Our findings suggest that analysing speech across the electoral term contributes to the understanding of inter-party conflict dynamics. Therefore, this novel time-variant indicator should be considered as an explanatory variable in future research on cabinet survival.