Breaking the Inertia : government formation under the shadow of a Core Party : the Italian case during the First Republic

Despite its theoretical relevance (Schofield 1995, 2006; Schofield and Sened 2006) the role played by the existence of a core party (as well of cycle sets) in explaining the partisan composition of governments, represents an understudied area in the empirical literature on coalition formations. The current paper aims to cover this lack in the literature by focusing on the Italian case between 1946 and 1993. We take advantage of a new dataset that takes between-election dynamics into due account, contrary to other well-known (and widely used) dataset (such as CMP or expert-surveys). The hypotheses derived from the spatial theory not only find a strong empirical corroboration in the data, but they also help to better understand the role played by other classical variables. Indeed, the nature of the cabinet-bargaining process appears to be qualitatively different when a core-party is present compared to when it is not. In the former situation, the probability to form a single party government considerably increases, while the role played by familiarity and political inertia, that appears so relevant when a core party is absent, simply ceases to be significant. Beyond better accounting for government formation, our results add a new insight on some important aspects of the Italian history, helping in identifying the necessary (spatial) conditions under which the (durable) cycle of a government formula can be expected to be broken.