ABSTRACT
In regimes with governmental instability a change of government does not, most of the time, mean the replacement of all outgoing ministers by newcomers. If instability devoured all ministers, it would not last long because the leaders—instead of benefiting from instability—would be its victims. The governmental nucleus includes ministers who hold the most important positions and who remain in power most of the time. The existence of a ministerial core can be explained by the fact that political parties tend to delegate their leaders to government. The Finnish political system has succeeded in building an equilibrium between presidency, parliament, and government, in which the stability—uninterrupted or recurrent—of party leaders in the cabinet, along with the length of the presidential mandate, created an antidote to possible noxious effects of ministerial turnovers. In Austria, twenty-two cabinets followed one another in the fifteen years between October 1918 and September 1933, with the continuous presence of a group of leaders in the cabinet.
