THE DURATION OF CABINET FORMATION PROCESSES IN WESTERN MULTIPARTY DEMOCRACIES

Strategic models of coalition bargaining formation have demonstrated t he importance of institutional features for an understanding of cabine t formation in West European democracies. Yet little is know about the empirical regularities of government formation processes. In this art icle we analyse the duration of formation processes using a semi-param etric estimation procedure on a dataset of 304 government formations i n thirteen multi-party democracies. The results are consistent with a bargaining approach under incomplete information.