A Spatial Analysis of Policy Stability in Western Democracies,I: A Society-Centered Model with Applications to Spain and Sweden

Abstract

In this article, I suggest a new typology for the stability of a political system, differentiating policy stability from government stability. I argue that it is when a system is policy-stable that we expect to see a stable and efficacious government. Even when a government change occurs, the policy preferences of the new government are likely to be similar to those of the previous one and we don't expect to see radical policy changes. I go on to show the conditions of policy stability by building a formal model of coalition formation among social groups, assuming a society is made up of social groups with distinctive policy preferences. I show political and social conditions under which stability is likely by studying power distributions among the social groups and the preferences they have over politically salient issues under which a certain set of policies can be stably implemented. In the first part of this article, the government is assumed to have no direct control over societal resources. In the second part, I examine an alternative model in which the government holds direct control over societal resources of its own. I apply the model developed here to the examples of Spain and Sweden throughout this article.