PARTY FACTIONALISM AND CABINET DURABILITY

Most studies of coalition behavior have treated political parties as u nitary actors. Building on extant literature, this paper relaxes the u nitary actor assumption in order to develop a theory about the impact of party factionalism on cabinet duration. Specifically, cabinets comp osed of factionalized parties are expected to exhibit less stability. Cross-national data corroborate the hypothesis, demonstrating the impo rtance of intra-party characteristics in determining coalition behavio r.