Digital Appendix | No Love Lost: Cabinet Survival in the European Union Member-States amid Permacrisis

Since the early 2020s, almost half of the cabinets in European Union countries have been dissolved ahead of time, and many of these dissolutions have caused snap elections. Considering rising non-systematic opposition, party polarisation, and external challenges of European countries, relevance of current findings of cabinet survival scholarship may be challenged. We propose a theoretical framework that shows cabinet dissolution as a rational behavior based on structural and random factors. Using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), we identify 4 possible mechanisms of cabinet dissolution driven by different incentives. We show that minority cabinets usually benefit from snap elections, while for wide majority coalitions cabinet dissolution is more driven by crisis and reputational costs, signalled by second-level elections. We also provide descriptions of unique mechanisms in France and classic yet fading mechanism of cabinet reshuffle in Estonia, depicting a diversity of possible incentives for cabinet dissolutions.