The literature on cabinet formation in parliamentary democracies is replete with theoretical explanations of why some cabinets form and others do not. This theoretical richness, however, has not led to the development of a healthy empirical literature designed to choose between competing theories. In this paper, we try to rectify this problem by developing an empirical model that can adequately
... [Show full abstract] capture the kind of choice situation that is inherent in cabinet selection and then using it to evaluate the leading theories of cabinet formation that have been advanced in the literature. For example, this analysis allows us to make conclusions about the relative importance in cabinet formation of traditional variables like size and ideology, as well as to evaluate the impact that recent new-institutionalist theories (such as Laver and Shepsle 1996) have on our ability to predict and explain cabinet formation over and above the more traditional explanations.