Young or New? a Temporal Approach to Institutionalization of European Party Systems (1848-2015)

Numerous studies have documented the sharp East-West division of Europe as far as political attitudes, political behavior and the volatility of party systems are concerned (Rohrschneider and Whitefield 2012, Casal Bertoa, 2013). Much less is known about the regional and temporal differences concerning the logics of government formation. Building on a new index of party system closure (Casal Bertoa and Enyedi 2014), and using an original dataset comprising almost 1500 cabinets, this paper investigates the stability of the party relations as reflected by the partisan composition of governments in Europe since the middle of the 19th century. The aim of the analysis is to find out whether the stage of the democratic development, the time of transition or the regional-historical legacies explain better the variation in the degree of stability.