Structural duration conveys stability but also resilience in central government and is therefore a key issue in the debate on the structure and organization of government. This paper discusses three core variants of structural duration to study the explanatory relevance of politics. We compare these durations across ministerial units in four European democracies (Germany, France, The Netherlands, and Norway) from 1980 to 2013, totaling over 17,000 units. Our empirical analyses show that cabinets' ideological turnover and extremism are the most significant predictors of all variants of duration, whereas polarization in parliament as well as new prime ministers without office experience yield the predicted significant negative effects for most models. We discuss these findings and avenues for future research that acknowledge the definition and measures for structural change as well as temporal aspects of the empirical phenomenon more explicitly.

中文翻译：

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公共官僚机构的政治时间：解释欧洲政府结构持续时间的变化

结构期限体现了中央政府的稳定性和弹性，因此是政府结构和组织辩论中的一个关键问题。本文讨论了结构持续时间的三个核心变体，以研究政治的解释相关性。我们比较了 1980 年至 2013 年间四个欧洲民主国家（德国、法国、荷兰和挪威）部长级单位的任期，总计超过 17,000 个单位。我们的实证分析表明，内阁的意识形态更替和极端主义是所有持续时间变量的最重要预测因素，而议会的两极分化以及没有任职经验的新总理会对大多数模型产生预测的显着负面影响。我们讨论这些发现和未来研究的途径，更明确地承认结构变化的定义和措施以及经验现象的时间方面。