The preceding chapter gave a glimpse of our model at work. The main purpose of that chapter, however, was to illustrate the model rather than to explore its empirical implications in a systematic way. Here we set off on a more comprehensive exploration with the ultimate objective of turning the model loose, so to speak, on the real world of government formation in particular countries. We do not do this because we have ambitions to take over the turf of the country specialists – we have no intention of trying to reproduce the qualitative analyses at which they excel. Rather we hope that an operational version of our model will provide a technology that allows us to be more systematic in how we go about specific aspects of particular country analyses. In this chapter, we begin the process of applying our model systematically to the formation of actual governments. After first presenting a series of theoretical implications of our model for government formation in the real world, we then turn to matters of operationalizing the model and using it to engage in comparative empirical analysis.

THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS

The most fundamental principle of our entire approach states that, when the government formation process is triggered for some reason, either the status quo government remains in power or it is replaced by some alternative that is preferred to this by a parliamentary majority. We state this “ground zero” implication as: