Political Parties and Monetary Commitments

William Bernhard and David Leblang

International Organization, 2002, vol. 56, issue 4, 803-830

Abstract: Increased levels of economic openness in the industrial democracies have heightened the potential for intra-party and intra-coalition policy conflicts, hurting the ability of parties to win and retain office. We argue that politicians can use monetary commitments to help manage these conflicts and improve cabinet durability. To determine the political value of these commitments, we test the effect of fixed exchange rates and central bank independence on cabinet durability using a set of 193 cabinets in sixteen parliamentary democracies across the period 1972–98. The results indicate that monetary commitments are associated with higher cabinet durability, particularly for coalition governments. We then use the results of our statistical models to generate expected cabinet durability under alternative institutional configurations. By comparing these expected values, we show that actual monetary reforms in the industrial democracies have helped (or at least not hurt) the ability of political parties to remain in office.

Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:intorg:v:56:y:2002:i:04:p:803-830_44

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Organization from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().