Success, Survival and Probabilistic Voting: The Case of a ruling Party

In this article, we empirically study the survival of the ruling party in parliamentary democracies using a hazard rate model. We define survival of a crisis as being on the winning side in a critical vote in the parliament. We develop a general probabilistic model of political crises and test it empirically. We find that during crises, parties in the parliament are likely to vote independently of each other. Thus, we receive as an empirical result what the voting power literature widely assumed.