Article

Government Formation in Parliamentary Democracies

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Abstract

Research on government formation in parliamentary democracies is replete with theoretical arguments about why some coalitions form while others do not. Unfortunately, this theoretical richness has not led to the development of an empirical tradition that allows scholars to evaluate the relative importance of competing theories. We resolve this problem by applying an empirical framework that is appropriate for modeling coalition choice to evaluate several leading explanations of government formation. Our approach allows us to make conclusions about the relative importance of traditional variables relating to size and ideology and to assess the impact of recent new-institutionalist theories on our ability to explain and predict government formation.

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... The literature on the process of coalition formation relies on models that delineate a strategic interaction between political parties, which should result in the formation of a (multi-party) government. These models elaborate a series of attributes about potential coalitions, which have an impact on the likelihood that a given party composition will form a cabinet (see Laver 1998;Martin & Stevenson 2001). ...
... For example, some studies highlight the advantage of the incumbent cabinet parties for becoming again a member of the government after the next round of coalition negotiations (Laver & Shepsle 1996;Martin & Stevenson 2010;Schleiter & Bucur 2023). Moreover, pre-election agreements (Golder 2006) or explicit declarations of rejecting parties as coalition partners (Debus 2009;Martin & Stevenson 2001) represent behavioural norms helping to predict the parliamentary agreement that will form between political parties. These behavioural constraints mark party competition and affect the post-electoral phase of government formation. ...
... We use a conditional logit model (McFadden 1973) to explain the outcome of the government formation process in the countries under study. The specification defines each government formation process as a separate choice set (see Martin & Stevenson 2001). The model predicts which of the potential Notes: the number of alternatives represent all the potential coalitions that can form a government after a given formation opportunity. ...
Article
This article examines the determinants of the partisan composition of cabinets formed in the last twenty years in Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Assuming that coalition formation processes take place in three-dimensional political spaces, we assess the impact of the ideological heterogeneity of potential coalitions on economic, EU-related, and socio-cultural issues on the chances that a combination of parties finally forms a cabinet. We find that – in line with the intensified role exerted by EU institutions in domestic affairs – parties were more likely to form a coalition government with those actors who share similar positions on an economic and an EU integration dimension.
... More importantly to the scope of this dissertation, though, previous research has argued that pre-election coalitions 1 drive the processes of government formation and portfolio allocation to some extent (Carroll, 2007;Freudenreich, 2016;Martin e Stevenson, 2001;Peron, 2018). That is, pre-electoral alliances would not only influence electoral affairs but would also directly affect the days after the elections (Albala, 2021;Chiru, 2015;Golder, 2005;Ibenskas, 2016;Spoon e West, 2015). ...
... Early scholarship on pre-electoral coalitions revealed that potential governments coalesced at an early stage of the electoral cycle are more likely to form as the actual governments than purely post-electoral governments in parliamentary systems (Martin e Stevenson, 2001;Strøm et al., 1994). The rationale is pretty consolidated: political parties engage in pre-electoral bargaining to increase their likelihood of either forming or being part of the upcoming government (Golder, 2006;Debus, 2009;Ibenskas, 2016). ...
... Most remarkably, conditional logit techniques have a close-knit relationship with the literature on government formation under parliamentarian (e.g. Martin e Stevenson, 2001). As Freudenreich (2016, p. 90) well noted, though, studies on presidential regimes have not followed the same methodological approach. ...
Thesis
This dissertation assesses which conditions enable the transition of pre-electoral coalitions into coalition governments in Latin American presidential regimes through a multimethod research design. Even though most literature praises the fact that pre-electoral coalitions exert a non-negligible impact on government formation in presidentialism, I present a nuance to this relationship by arguing that pre-electoral coalitions are not automatically transformed into coalition cabinets in presidentialism. This is so because of the nature of presidential institutions, which grants presidents the opportunity to revise the pre-electoral agreement once they hold office at the same time that diminishes the extent to which pre-electoral coalition members can punish them. Against this backdrop, the first empirical paper puts forward and tests the claim that pre-electoral pacts should be more binding to the extent that legislative polarisation is more pervasive in the party system. The reason is that an increased ideological dividedness at the party system level reduces presidents’ margins to build coalition cabinets not based on the pre-electoral pact, as complexity bargaining hampers the presidential ability to assemble parties with conflicting policy preferences in the same cabinet. In addition, based on a configurational rationale, the second empirical paper investigates what makes pre-electoral coalitions serve as the foundations of post-electoral coalition cabinets, given that pre-electoral commitments can be enlarged, maintained or shrunk until the government’s inauguration day. The results highlight the importance of five conditions, albeit with more prominence for the pre-electoral coalition majority status, the low polarisation between pre-electoral coalition members and the high legislative polarisation. Taken together, the findings of this dissertation enlarge our knowledge of the relationship between pre-electoral coalitions and government formation in presidentialism by showing its entanglement with legislative polarisation.
... Parties' motivations for joining a government coalition are the outcome of a process in which they try to maximize various party strategies (Debus 2008). Coalition-formation theories point to tactical considerations regarding projected power in office, vote maximization and policy implementation as major reasons that shape parties' coalition preferences (Bäck 2003;Martin and Stevenson 2001). So far, however, party justifications underlying coalition formation with populist parties and the motivations underlying mainstream parties' (un)willingness to rule with populist parties remain largely underexplored. ...
... Mainstream parties may evaluate populist parties as unattractive partners from a substantive perspective due to incompatible policy priorities, policy programmes and/or ideological profiles (Bassi 2017). The minimal-range theory identifies the most successful coalition formula as the one with the lowest ideological diversity (Axelrod 1970;Martin and Stevenson 2001). When multiple coalition options are viable, formulas with populist parties may be ignored as mainstream parties may prefer partners that allow an ideologically congruent government (Deschouwer 2008). ...
... A second group of reasons stems from considerations regarding projected power in office. First, organizational difficulties in forming a numerical majority could arise: the populist party could simply not fit in any formula to form a majority without a surplus, or other combinations may result in a stronger majority (Bassi 2017;Martin and Stevenson 2001). Similarly, a majority with a populist party may be too narrow and, hence, unstable. ...
Article
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Parties usually argue in favour or against a government coalition based on party considerations in terms of projected policy implementation, power in office and vote maximization – that is, the ‘policy, office, votes’ triad. So far, however, it remains unclear which claims mainstream parties invoke to motivate their choice to rule or not rule with populist parties. Adopting the ‘policy, voter, office’ triad, this article examines mainstream parties' Twitter claims on ruling with populist parties in Austria, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands (2006–2021, N = 1,919). Mainstream parties mainly reject ruling with (mostly radical right) populist parties. To justify unwillingness, policy-based motives referring to the populist parties' extremist nature trump motives on office-seeking and vote maximization. To justify willingness, predominantly office-seeking motivations are invoked. Party characteristics (ideology, incumbency status, size) and context, however, shape these claims. This study sheds light on mainstream parties' patterns of political communication on coalition formation with populist parties.
... Recent scholarship demonstrates that the arrangement of coalition cabinet/governments often helps voters update their perceptions of cabinet members' ideological positions and shifts (Fortunato and Stevenson 2013;Fortunato and Adams 2015). Given that a (coalition) cabinet is accountable to or, at a minimum, tolerated by the majority of a given parliament (Strøm 2000), the formation of a (coalition) government generally contains politicians/parties who share similar ideologies so that policy promises can be fulfilled (Carroll and Cox 2007;Martin and Stevenson 2001). These relatively homogeneous cabinets, in turn, provide voters with an easily accessible political heuristic for determining the ideological positions of the cabinet as a whole and its member specifically. ...
... As demonstrated in the literature, participating in a (coalition) cabinet is treated as a heuristic by voters when they try to avoid the prohibitive cost of monitoring actual policymaking and tend to follow less costly but informative and observable sources of information (Fortunato and Stevenson 2013;Lau and Redlawsk 2001). This is because rank-and-file voters generally recognize that government participants are both ideologically closer and more likely to compromise with each other (e.g., Dodd 1974;Martin and Stevenson 2001;Schofield and Laver 1985;Warwick 1996). Therefore, cabinet members (and their parties) are considered to hold close/similar ideological positions by voters. ...
... 2006; Martin and Stevenson 2001;Schofield and Laver 1985). Furthermore, politicians and parties within a (coalition) government are also more likely to compromise (i.e., merge) their positions (e.g., Dodd 1974;Martin and Vanberg 2005;Warwick 1996). ...
Article
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Numerous studies of comparative political behavior examine how voters perceive parties' ideological positions on various policy issues, either in a standard uni-dimensional space or on single issues. These studies assume these ideological positions to be representative of the entire governing coalition, classifying the government as a single uni-tary. While a common assumption when assessing coalition governments' ideological positions, it is unclear whether this logic of shared accountability holds for voters' perceptions of valence. To fill this gap, I use a conjoint experiment to assess the perceptual influence of valence issues on coalitional accountability. Overall, my results show that unlike standard left-right ideological positions, voters project the prime minister's and (junior) cabinet members' low valence bidirectionally onto each other. This research has implications for the prime minister's selection process for (junior) cabinet members and junior parties' own calculus of whether to participate in a coalition or not.
... Potential governments are more viable as outside options, the more likely they are to form. A large body of research on government formation has found that numerical and ideological factors affect how likely different government types are to form (Laver & Schofield 1990;Martin & Stevenson 2001, for an overview). If no single parliamentary party controls a majority of parliamentary seats, a coalition government containing the smallest number of parties to cross the majority threshold (minimum winning coalition) ...
... Formateurs, however, also incur costs by including certain junior parties 1 Minority and surplus governments, however, make up a significant number of governments during the post-World War II era, one third and one fourth, respectively (Crombez 1996;Strøm 1984;Volden & Carrubba 2004). Minority governments are more likely to form under certain institutional settings (Strøm 1984), and the more fragmented and polarized the opposition is (Martin & Stevenson 2001). Surplus governments can arise in times of crises (Baron & Diermeier 2001), if the formateur is small and not centrally located (Crombez 1996), if legislative logrolls are not sustainable (Carrubba & Volden 2000), or if a different majority in the upper chamber is needed to pass legislation (Lijphart 1984). in a coalition government, both during the formation process and the ongoing bargaining process once in office. ...
... Finally, I also calculate the ideological range between the two most extreme parties in each potential government and generate a dummy variable indicating if the government in fact entered office. I use all of these variables in a conditional logit model Western Australia (2015) to estimate each potential government's political viability, that is, the likelihood of it entering office (Martin & Stevenson 2001): ...
Thesis
Why are some junior coalition members able to extract significantly greater concessions from their partners than others? I argue that junior partners are able to do so if they can credibly threaten to exit the incumbent government. Such exit threats are only credible if they can enter into alternative governments that are both viable and ideologically attractive to them. Thus, I expect junior parties to extract greater concessions, the more exit power they control. I test this hypothesis on three observable implications of multi-party policy-making. First, I expect government spending to vary systematically with the strongest party's bargaining leverage. I find that spending only increases in the number of governing parties if the strongest party controls relatively little exit power. The effect is mitigated as its exit power increases. Second, I analyze under what conditions government parties are able to influence how expenditures are allocated across different spending areas. While all governing parties have the incentive to implement policies that reward their constituents, only exit power provides them with the means to implement their ideologically motivated spending preferences. I find that the composition of the budget reflects the spending preferences of parties with significant exit power more closely. Finally, I address why some parties receive more ministerial portfolios than others. I expect parties to receive more, and more important, portfolios if they can credibly threaten to exit current government negotiations. I present two approaches to estimate ministerial allocation data as unbalanced and irregular compositional data. In this project, I generate and use a novel measure of parties' exit power that is comparable across countries and over time. It is theoretically motivated and captures parties' next best options in case of a bargaining breakdown. I simulate all approximately 120,000 potential governments that could have formed in developed democracies during the postwar era. For each of these governments, I estimate its formation likelihood and its ideological appeal to each of its members. For each party in government, I calculate its exit power relative to that of its partners and use this as my main explanatory variable.
... We show that the coalition outcome ceases to be poorly understandable once parties' policy positions are measured along these two dimensions, rather than on the general left-right continuum. Martin and Stevenson (2001) provided a comprehensive testing of the implications of formal models of coalition formation. They concluded that about 40% of the governments that actually formed in Western Europe are predicted by their model, which incorporates several variables highlighted in coalition theory. ...
... Formal theory of coalition formation predicts that governments are more likely to form when they satisfy a combination of requirements: they control a majority of seats in the parliamentpossibly a minimal winning majority containing no unnecessary partyand include partners with similar ideological backgrounds (Laver and Schofield, 1990;Laver, 1998;Martin and Stevenson, 2001). Governing parties are expected to gain control over as many cabinet portfolios as possible and implement policies that are closest to their ideal policy preferences. ...
... This time span encompasses five legislatures and eight bargaining processes over government formation, excluding the one that led to the caretaker cabinet headed by Mario Monti . 3 To identify the factors underlying government formation we use a conditional logistic regression model following the approach introduced in the literature by Martin and Stevenson (2001). Our analysis reveals that the statistical model we use fails to correctly predict the Conte I government formation. ...
Article
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The formation of the 'yellow-green' government that took office in Italy after the general election held on 4 March 2018 looked puzzling to many commentators as the two coalition partners-the Five Star Movement and the League-appeared to be quite distant on the left-right continuum. In this article, we argue that despite being widely used in the literature, a unidimensional representation of parties' policy positions on the encompassing left-right scale is inadequate to explain the process of coalition govern-ments' formation. We focus first on coalition outcomes in Italy in the period 2001-18. Our statistical analysis including, among other variables, parties' policy distance on the left-right dimension performs rather well until 2013 but fails to predict the coalition outcome in 2018. To solve the puzzle, we propose a two-dimensional spatial account of the Conte I government formation in which the first dimension coincides with the economic left-right and the second one is related to immigration, the European Union issues and social conservatism. We show that the coalition outcome ceases to be poorly understandable once parties' policy positions are measured along these two dimensions, rather than on the general left-right continuum.
... (2) s j = −y j + e j 3 The assumption of binding electoral announcements is pervasive in the literature (see, for instance, Schultz, 1996;Persson and Tabellini, 1999;Martin and Stevenson, 2001;Bellettini and Roberti, 2020). Two contributions, Alesina (1988) and Aragones et al. (2007), have rationalized the assumption by looking at reputational mechanisms. ...
... As explained in the theoretical section, we follow some influential previous literature(Alesina, 1988;Aragones et al., 2007;Martin and Stevenson, 2001;Persson and Tabellini, 1999;Schultz, 1996) and assume binding electoral announcements (for details, see footnote 3). Accordingly, a polarized pre-electoral environment is conducive to an ideologically polarized government; thus, a post-election variable can capture pre-election concerns. ...
Article
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We model a two-party electoral game with rationally inattentive voters. Parties are endowed with different administrative competencies and announce a fiscal platform to be credibly implemented in case of electoral success. The budgetary impact of each platform depends on the party’s competence and on a stochastic implementation shock. Voters rely on the announced platform to infer a party’s unobserved competence. In addition, voters receive noisy signals on the impact of each fiscal platform with noise depending ultimately on a voter’s cognitive skills. We predict that the interplay between the desire of parties to win the election (the incentive to manipulate voters’ beliefs) and voters’ (lack of) cognitive skills (the scope for manipulation) distorts fiscal policies towards excessive budget deficits. The mechanism is that parties attempt to manipulate inferences on their competencies by implementing a loose fiscal policy. The predictions are tested empirically on a sample of advanced economies over years 1999–2008. Our results remain stable after controlling for potentially confounding differences across countries and over time, along with unobserved heterogeneity. Finally, alternative mechanisms potentially driving our results are investigated and ruled out.
... Politikos mokslų teorijoje nėra vieningos nuomonės dėl mažumos vyriausybių sudarymą sąlygojančių, teigiamai ir neigiamai įtakojančių partinės sistemos veiksnių. Vienų autorių nuomone, mažumos vyriausybių sudarymą skatina aukštas rinkėjų balsavimo paslankumas, aukšti partinės sistemos poliarizacijos ir fragmentacijos rodikliai, taip pat kai kurie politinės kultūros ypatumai 22 . Kitų autorių nuomone, tokius teiginius sunku pagrįsti empiriškai, todėl reikėtų vertinti visiškai kitus veiksnius. ...
... Todėl partijų vertybinės programinės nuostatos yra sunykusios, per rinkimus ir po jų partijos elgiasi, atsižvelgdamos į politinę konjunktūrą, o ne į savo įsipareigojimus rinkėjams. Partijų ir jų lyderių 22 Strom, (nuoroda 7), p. 206-208, Green-Pedersen (nuoroda 12), p. 10. 23 Strom (nuoroda 3), p. 237-238. 24 Lietuvos valstybinio mokslo ir studijų fondas, "Lietuvos politinės partijos: struktūrinio ir funkcinio pajėgumo tyrimas", Vilnius, 2005, http://www.tspmi.vu.lt/files/news/partiju%20tyrimas%20(s antrauka%201).doc, ...
... Beyond the overall role of incumbency, we postulate secondary hypotheses regarding how incumbent representation may interact with various party characteristics and the local political context. We focus on factors that earlier literature has found to be important in government formation: party size and ideology (e.g., Martin and Stevenson 2001;Mattila and Raunio 2004;Bäck, Debus, and Dumont 2011), and complexity of the bargaining environment (e.g., Martin and Vanberg 2003;Golder 2010;Blockmans et al. 2016). ...
... It is possible that the advantage depends on the ideological position of a party relative to others. In prior work, researchers have shown that the greater the ideological distance between two parties is, the less likely it is that they become coalition partners (Laver 1998;Martin and Stevenson 2001). Although ideology does not influence whether a party is represented in the municipal board or not in our case, it could still matter for seat distribution at the intensive margin. ...
Preprint
The composition of governing coalitions does not always reflect the relative sizes of the coalition members, but research has not been able to fully reconcile why. We propose that political parties with more (re-elected) incumbent representatives fare better in coalitional bargaining. To evaluate this argument empirically, we construct a data set of parties and governing coalitions in Finnish local governments. Using an instrumental variable strategy that hinges on within-party close elections between incumbents and non-incumbents, we find that, ceteris paribus, having more re-elected incumbents improves a party’s coalitional bargaining outcomes. Descriptive evidence suggests that incumbent representation is particularly useful when a party is in a disadvantaged position (e.g., it is ideologically distant from other parties) and when the bargaining environment is more complex (e.g., there are more parties). Lastly, incumbent representation also matters for selection: parties that have more incumbent representatives nominate more incumbents in the municipal executive.
... I achieved this effect by applying a case selection formula, relativising their arithmetic strength (quantitative dimension) and, in a qualitative sense, taking into account the ideological distance between the parties that I am interested in and their coalition partners. By considering the number of variables when examining the determinants of the participation of small parties in government coalitions, I referred to the research conducted by Lanny W. Martin and Randolph T. Stevenson (2001), although the scope of my undertaking was much narrower. Hence, this study provides a springboard for examining the capability of the parties that have similar levels of power in different party systems. ...
... For instance, seeBrowne, 1971;Swaan, 1973;Budge and Keman, 1990;Laver and Shepsle, 1996;Warwick, 1996;Laver and Schofield, 1998;Martin and Stevenson, 2001;Bäck, Meier and Persson, 2009;Kang, 2009;Bäck, Debus and Dumont, 2011;Döring and Hellström, 2013;Huidobro and Falcó-Gimeno, 2023. 2 For instance, seeDeheza, 1997;Altman, 2000;Chasquetti, 2001;Zelaznik, 2002;Cheibub, Przeworski and Saiegh, 2004; Neto, 2006a,b;Machado, 2009;Alemán and Tsebelis, 2011;Freudenreich, ...
Chapter
In this chapter, we examine the conditions under which the similarity in composition between post-electoral and pre-electoral coalitions prevails in presidential democracies with multiparty systems. We identify three key factors influencing the continuity between these coalitions: the legally mandated duration of the transition period, the legislative seat shares of pre-electoral coalition parties, and the ideological divergence within pre-electoral coalitions. Drawing on data from ten Latin American countries, our findings reveal that the longer the official transition period between election day and the inauguration of the government, the lower the continuity. Conversely, higher continuity results when pre-electoral coalition partners secure a larger share of seats after the elections and exhibit greater ideological alignment. These insights highlight the significance of pre-electoral alliances in shaping coalition government formation in presidential systems. We conclude with suggestions for future research to further explore these dynamics across different institutional settings and political contexts.
... Early scholarship on pre-electoral coalitions in parliamentarism has revealed that po-tential governments that coalesce at an early stage of the electoral cycle are more likely to form as actual governments than purely post-electoral governments (Martin and Stevenson 2001;Strøm et al. 1994). The rationale is pretty consolidated: political parties engage in pre-electoral bargaining to increase their likelihood of either forming or being a part of the upcoming government (Golder 2006;Debus 2009;Ibenskas 2016). ...
Article
Full-text available
Recent research has shed light on the impact of pre-electoral coalitions on government formation in presidential democracies. However, the fact that pre-electoral coalitions are not automatically transformed into coalition cabinets has often gone under the radar. In this article, I argue that the importance of pre-electoral pacts for government formation depends on the degree of legislative polarisation. When parties are distant from one another in the ideological spectrum, presidents face more difficulties in breaking away from the pre-electoral pact and rearranging their multiparty alliances. Conversely, when polarisation is not pervasive, presidents have more leeway to build coalition cabinets different from the ones prescribed by pre-electoral coalitions. Drawing on a dataset of thirteen Latin American countries, the results support my claim and suggest that the relationship between government formation and the concession of office benefits for pre-electoral coalition members is more nuanced than previously assumed.
... Solche werden in der Literatur zwar häufig im Hinblick auf das Wahlsystem im jeweiligen Land untersucht (Golder 2005;für Deutschland vgl. Linhart 2007;Pappi et al. 2006), vereinzelt auch hinsichtlich ihres Einflusses auf die Koalitionsbildung (beispielhaft siehe Best 2015; Bräuninger und Debus 2008;Bräuninger et al. 2020;Debus 2009;Decker 2010Decker , 2013Decker und Best 2010;Golder 2005Golder , 2006Jun 1994;Martin und Stevenson 2001, 2010. Die letztgenannten Studien weisen darauf hin, dass positiv wie negativ formulierte Koalitionsaussagen, die vor den Wahlen getroffen wurden, einen statistisch signifikanten und substanziellen Einfluss auf das Ergebnis des Regierungsbildungsprozesses haben. ...
Article
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Das Regieren in Mehrparteienkabinetten hat sich zum Normalfall in modernen Demokratien entwickelt. Daher verwundert es nicht, dass die Analyse des Prozesses der Bildung, des Regierens in und der Beendigung von Koalitionsregierungen zu einem Schwerpunkt der Vergleichenden Politikwissenschaft geworden ist. Wir legen in diesem Literature Review den Stand der Forschung zu Koalitionsregierungen dar, indem wir die jüngere Entwicklung in der Koalitionstheorie betrachten, um anschließend die Erkenntnisse insbesondere in den Bereichen der Analyse von Koalitionen zu beleuchten, die in den letzten Jahren deutlich an Beachtung gewonnen haben. Dazu zählen die Auswirkungen der institutionellen Merkmale politischer Systeme, etwa das Bestehen und die Ausgestaltung von Mehrebenenstrukturen oder die Kompetenzen von Parlamenten insbesondere im Kontext der Investitur einer neuen Regierung, sowie die Perzeption des Regierens in Koalitionen durch die Wähler und die Analyse der Koalitionsverhandlungsdauer und der Koalitionsabkommen. Abschließend diskutieren wir Ansätze für Fragestellungen, die vielversprechend für die weitere Entwicklung der wissenschaftlichen Analyse von Koalitionsregierungen sein können, insbesondere aufgrund der massiven Fortschritte im Bereich der quantitativen Daten- und Textanalyse.
... Kadima (2014) postulates that the main reason for the formation of coalition governments in Africa as elsewhere in the world is to hold public or municipal office. Martin and Stevenson (2001) concur with Kadima's assertion and further posit that the primary goal of political parties entering into some coalition governments in their respective municipalities is to hold office and attain power to control. One of the benefits enjoyed most by parties in coalition governments is occupying mayoral committee (municipal executive) positions or any other positions agreed upon by the parties concerned. ...
Article
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Coalition government is an old phenomenon that has got its roots in Western European countries. It has since spread all over the world including in South Africa. Coalitions in the local sphere of government have existed predominantly in KwaZulu Natal and Western Cape, but it has since spread over to other provinces in South Africa. The outcome of the 2016 local government elections brought about dramatic results which saw the governments of three metropolitan municipalities change hands to coalitions of political parties. The Democratic Alliance (DA) and other small parties with the assistance of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) constituted coalition governments in Nelson Mandela Bay (in Eastern Cape), City of Tshwane, and Johannesburg in Gauteng province. However, the DA mayor and his executive in Nelson Mandela Bay have since been removed with the one from the United Democratic Movement (UDM) as a mayor and the executives from the African National Congress (ANC) and other smaller parties. The EFF announced in July 2019 that it will not vote with the DA or ANC in all municipalities where coalition councils must be formed. This paper seeks to identify challenges associated with coalition governments in the local sphere of government and propose possible solutions for curtailing such challenges. The paper does so by way of reviewing existing literature related to coalitions and alliances of municipal governments in South Africa. One of the challenges is the differing policy positions of the political parties in the coalition. This paper proposes that the needs and service delivery demands of the local communities must be given more preference over the political ideologies of the political parties concerned.
... Ideological similarity is an important factor in explaining how, and which, coalition governments form after elections. Coalitions are more likely to form if the participating parties share a high degree of policy positions on important policy dimensions (for an overview on standard theories of coalition formation, see Laver and Schofield 1998;Martin and Stevenson 2001). They are also easier to negotiate and to maintain and are therefore expected to last longer (Damgaard 2010;Ecker and Meyer 2020). ...
Article
European party systems have become increasingly complex in recent years, resulting in ideologically more heterogeneous coalition governments with far-reaching policy compromises. Consequently, an important goal of the parties’ electoral campaign strategies is to present the voters a distinct policy profile on which the electorate can evaluate the competing parties. We argue that voters reward those coalition parties that attack their government partners in the election campaign and try to clarify their programmatic positions with the help of a more aggressive campaign strategy. Based on data from the CSES, the Comparative Manifesto Project database and a novel data base on party campaign statements in seven European countries from 2007 to 2018, we find that voters’ support for coalition parties increases if the latter attack their partners in the last four weeks before election day. Yet, this relationship is only observable in contexts when the ideological diversity of the incumbent coalition government is rather low.
... Debus 2009;Golder 2006;Ibenskas 2016). It has been shown that the probability of parties forming a government together after an election increases if these parties entered into a pre-electoral coalition beforehand (Debus 2009;Martin and Stevenson 2001). Debus (2009) argues that we should analyse the impact of both 'positive' and 'negative' pre-electoral commitments when connecting the electoral stage to the formation stage. ...
... Parties usually -but not always -choose coalition partners that are ideologically similar to themselves (e.g. Martin and Stevenson 2001). And the ministerial portfolio probably reflects the core issues of the party. ...
Book
This comprehensive and comparative book makes clear what party families are and, in doing so, helps categorise and make sense of parties in different countries. It describes the ideology of the families in Western Europe as well as classifying political parties accordingly. Furthermore, the book examines who the party families’ supporters are in terms of their social background and political values. What role do class, education, and religion play in the 21st century? Finally, the book provides a discussion of the degree to which the concept of party families is still meaningful in the 21st century and how it needs to be studied comparatively and comprehensively. Is party family still valid as a conceptual device to classify and compare parties across countries in Western Europe? This text will be of key interest to scholars, students, and practitioners working in the field of political behaviour, political parties and party politics, policy studies, and more broadly comparative and European politics. Available here: https://www.routledge.com/Party-Families-in-Western-Europe/Langsaether/p/book/9781138336964
... That is, they reject all parameter values in a large interval 7 For further detail on the data considered in the analysis see the online Appendix A.1. 8 For a discussion regarding this choice see Warwick (1996) and Martin and Stevenson (2001). 9 The β in the tables are the coefficients of the parameter estimates of my models, which should not be interpreted as standard ordinary least square coefficients. ...
Article
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In coalition governments, parties need to agree on a common policy position. Whose preferences prevail? The proportionality hypothesis, the idea that coalition partners’ influence on policy is proportional to their share of seats, has been used widely in the literature on democratic representation, ideological congruence, and coalition politics. In my analysis of competing theories aimed at determining what influences policy compromise in multiparty governments, I reject the proportionality hypothesis. My results suggest instead that coalition partners exert equal influence on policy compromises, independent of their number of seats. More extensive analysis also provides evidence for increased party influence on policies when the party is the formateur or closer to the parliamentary median, ceteris paribus. As a by-product of my analysis, I provide a simple and better proxy for measuring a government's position when this position is not directly observable.
... Although the party-system level measure is the most appropriate for my research question given that the measure of perceptions of party differences takes the entire party system as its object of reference, the dyadic and party levels are also of potential interest. For example, dyadic values may be helpful in studies of vote switching (Dejaeghere & Dassonneville, 2017;Spoon & Klüver, 2019), coalition formation (Martin & Stevenson, 2001) and niche party success (Meguid, 2005). These are all areas where ideological similarity structures voter and party behavior, so I expect the degree of issue salience divergence to similarly matter. ...
Article
This paper argues that issue salience divergence – the extent to which parties in a party system diverge in their allocation of salience across issues – is a key characteristic of party system decidability. Elections do not only matter in that politicians and parties with different policy positions may come to power. They can also matter if competing elites emphasize different issues. Using data from the MARPOR project and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, I demonstrate that voters perceive greater differences between parties when parties propose agendas that diverge with respect to issue salience. Furthermore, I demonstrate that perceptions of differences between parties mediate the effect of issue salience divergence on respondents’ satisfaction with democracy and self‐reported voter turnout. These findings indicate that salience‐based differentiation influences the quality of party systems alongside the traditional party system characteristics with important implications for public opinion and political behavior.
... First, ideological proximity between parties might also be an important factor for party competition and cooperation. On the one hand, ideological proximity is one of key factors to predict coalition formation (Martin and Stevenson 2001; see also Axelrod 1970). On the other hand, it is also often hypothesized to influence affective polarization (e.g., Gidron, Adams, and Horne 2020). ...
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Highlighting the strength of “partyism” in many democracies, recent scholarship pays keen attention to increasing hostility and distrust among citizens across party lines, known as affective polarization. By combining a conjoint analysis with decision-making games such as dictator and trust games, we design a novel survey experiment to systematically estimate and compare the strength of the partisan divide relative to other social divides across 25 European democracies. This design also allows us to investigate how the two components of affective polarization, in-group favoritism and out-group derogation, are moderated by the way parties interact with each other. We first find dominance of the partisan divide compared to other social divides that constitute traditional cleavages such as social class and religion. Second, we show that affective polarization in Europe is not primarily driven by out-group animus. Finally, we demonstrate that coalition partnership lessens affective polarization by reducing both in-group and out-group biases.
... Hukumatning shakllanishiga oid munosabatlarni xorijlik olimlardan, M. Loyer [9], O. Xaffen [10], L.V. Martin va R.T. Stevenson [11], D. Diyermiyer, X. Eraslan, A. Merlo [12] va D.P. Baron [13]lar tadqiq qilishgan. ...
Article
This article discusses the parliamentary method, which is one of the modern methods of government formation. The views of legal scholars in this area are revealed and the constitutional and legal foundations for the formation of the highest executive body of foreign parliamentary countries, and its specific features are studied. Also, thanks to the analysis of legal documents on the formation of the government of the Republic of Uzbekistan, its important aspects are identified. A theoretical conclusion is made that the formation of the government of the Republic of Uzbekistan should be carried out on the basis of a parliamentary approach. The author’s conclusions about the establishment and implementation of constitutional procedures and principles for the resignation of the government and its members in parliamentary states are based on the following: the use of two methods of forming a government in foreign countries, namely parliamentary and non-parliamentary; the order of formation of the government and the ownership of the executive power depends primarily on the form of government of a particular state; fixing in the constitution important provisions for the formation of the government; government accountability to parliament and the head of state.
... A related literature focuses on the impact of pre-electoral commitments on government formation (e.g., Debus, 2009;Golder, 2006). Scholars have shown that the probability of a parties' ruling together after an election increases if these parties entered into a pre-electoral coalition beforehand (Debus, 2009;Martin and Stevenson, 2001). Debus (2009) argues for the importance of analysing the impact of 'positive' and 'negative' pre-electoral commitments. ...
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Most parliamentary democracies have seen a rise of populist radical parties during the past decades. Many countries have also experienced severely delayed government formation processes, with caretaker governments in office for extended periods of time. Are these delays related to the rise of radical parties? We argue that the rise of populist radical parties may prolong the bargaining process, due to the fact that these parties are often treated as pariahs by other parties during election campaigns, which creates a complex bargaining situation after the election. We evaluate this claim by studying 121 government formation processes in the German States from 1990 until 2021, using original data which includes statements made by parties during election campaigns. The findings show that a higher share of seats allocated to parties from the radical right and radical left results in an increasing amount of days until a new government is voted into office. We also find that when a party that has been characterized as being 'non-coalitionable' during the election campaign ends up among the negotiating parties, the government formation process is severely delayed. These findings suggest that the rise of populist radical parties may create severe challenges for parliamentary democracy.
... Furthermore, there is research on the impact of pre-electoral commitments on the outcome of the coalition game and on the advantage for incumbent governments in the next coalition formation process. Empirical analyses of coalition formation in modern democracies show that explanatory factors from all directions of coalition theory have a decisive impact on government formation on modern democracies (Martin & Stevenson 2001, 2010Strøm et al. 2003Strøm et al. , 2008Debus 2009;Golder et al. 2012). ...
Chapter
Politics and policy-making in modern democracies imply the search for compromises. In doing so, members of parliament with similar policy positions can form short-term coalitions to increase the chances that their law proposals are supported by a majority in the legislature. While the latter behavior of parliamentary representatives can often be observed in presidential systems, the government in parliamentary systems needs the support of a majority in the legislature, either to get into or to remain in office. In order to win stable majorities in parliaments over a longer time period, the parliamentary groups of political parties can either form legislative coalitions that agree on specific policy goals, so that a minority government is supported by a parliamentary majority, or they form executive coalitions where the coalition parties are also represented in the government and, thus, additionally have to agree on the distribution of ministerial posts.
... The most straightforward way to influence the identity of the formateur is by voting for his/her party, under the assumption that the larger the party's seat share, the greater the likelihood that its leader will be appointed as formateur. Indeed, in many cases the formateur is the leader of the largest party in parliament (Martin and Stevenson 2001). However, despite the formateur's central role in parliamentarian systems, empirical evidence about the effect of his/her identity on vote choice is scarce. ...
Article
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The existing literature on vote switching – a major cause of electoral change – rarely discusses strategic incentives as motivating voters to switch parties between elections. We study how coalition-directed voting, a common type of strategic voting in parliamentary democracies, affects vote switching. Utilizing an original three-wave online panel survey conducted in Israel in 2019–2020, we show that voters engage in formateur optimization and policy balancing: they switch their vote in order to affect the identity of the next formateur and desert a party they previously voted for if they believe it will not enter the next coalition. We also show that the perceived level of competition between potential formateurs moderates the effect of coalition expectations on vote switching. The paper highlights the importance of coalition and formateur considerations in electoral change and contributes to a better understanding of both coalition-directed voting and individual-level vote switching.
... This assumption primarily stems from theories of coalition formation at the elite level and especially from parties' policy-seeking motives (Axelrod 1970). Like voters, who receive more utility the closer the implemented policies are to their own position, parties tend to agree upon cooperation with another party whose positions are similar to their own stances (Martin and Stevenson 2001;Golder 2006). ...
Article
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The 2021 German federal election led to the formation of the so-called traffic-light coalition between the Social Democratic Party, the Green Party, and the Free Democratic Party, which had never before been agreed upon at the federal level. Over a long period, German parties had competed for government in relatively clear and ideologically homogeneous camps. However, fragmentation of the party system made majorities for two-party alliances more and more unlikely, and party elites needed to reassess new partnerships. Most of these novel coalitions, like the traffic-light coalition, are also cross-cutting dimensions of political competition in Germany. This raises the question of how voters reflect upon these novel government alternatives and make up their minds about which of them they would like to see in office. In this paper, I argue that a nuanced view on issues rather than general ideology offers more precise insights on the origins of voters’ coalition preferences. Furthermore, as salience theory suggests, not every issue is equally important for every part of the citizenry. Therefore, it is expected that the effects of voter–coalition distance as well as intracoalition heterogeneity on specific issues are moderated by individuals’ saliency of the respective issues. These expectations are tested using data from the 2021 preelection cross-section survey of the German Longitudinal Election Study. The results emphasize the relevance of specific issues as well as salience in the formation of voters’ coalition preferences.
... There is considerable research devoted to coalition formation (e.g. Ansolabehere et al., 2005;Bäck, 2008;Martin and Stevenson, 2001), portfolio allocation (e.g. Bäck et al., 2011;Laver and Shepsle, 1990) and cabinet survival (Lupia and Strøm, 1995). ...
Thesis
Welche Kommunikationsstrategien benutzen Koalitionsparteien während ihrer Zeit im Amt? Koalitionsparteien stehen vor einem Dilemma, dass sie zwar nach aussen Einheit demonstrieren sollen, sich aber gleichzeitig von ihren Partnern differenzieren müssen. Ich argumentiere, dass politische Kommunikation eine wichtige Rolle dabei spielt, wie Parteien versuchen, ihr individuelles Profil zu erhalten. Dazu habe ich drei Hauptstrategien definiert, die Parteien benutzen können. Basierend auf einem Datensatz von über 35'000 deutschen und niederländischen Pressemitteilungen von Koalitionsparteien analysiere ich, was Parteien in ihrer Strategiewahl beeinflusst. Meine Resultate zeigen, dass Personalisierung, definiert als ein verstärkter Fokus auf Individuen, davon beeinflusst wird, wie stark sich Koalitionsparteien ideologisch unterscheiden. Ich benutze einen supervised classification algorithm, um die deutschen Pressemitteilungen in verschiedene thematische Kategorien zu klassifizieren. Ich nutze diese Klassifizierung um zu analysieren, ob Parteien während dem Wahlkampf einen besonderen Fokus auf die Themen legen, die ihnen wichtig sind. Dies ist nicht der Fall, und meine Analysen zeigen, dass Parteien kurz vor einer Wahl sogar einen geringeren Schwerpunkt auf diese Themen legen, ungeachtet ideologischer Differenzen zwischen ihnen und ihren Koalitionspartnern. Schließlich analysiere ich die Präsenz von negativem Campaigning in deutschen Pressemitteilungen und in einer Auswahl von Episoden einer politischen Talkshow. Im Falle der Pressemitteilungen stelle ich fest, dass die Parteien mit zunehmender Wahrscheinlichkeit "feindlich gesinnte" Politiker erwähnen, je näher die Wahl rückt, und dass diese Erwähnungen mit einem generell negativerem sentiment der betreffenden Pressemitteilungen korrelieren.
... For a long time, most studies on coalition research have primarily focused on two particular phases in the life cycle of multiparty governments: government formation and termination (see Müller, Bergman and Ilonszki 2019). Analyses of government formation focus on the duration of coalition bargaining (see, for example, Diermeier and Roozendaal 1998;Ecker and Meyer 2020;Golder 2010;Martin and Vanberg 2003), the party composition of coalition governments (see, for example, Döring and Hellström 2013;Martin and Stevenson 2001) and the allocation of ministerial portfolios among coalition partners (see, for example, Bäck, Debus and Dumont 2011;Browne and Franklin 1973;Ecker, Meyer and Müller 2015;Warwick and Druckman 2001;Warwick and Druckman 2006). There is an equally rich tradition of research analysing the determinants of government stability and survival (see, for example, Conrad and Golder 2010;Krauss 2018;Laver 2003;Schleiter and Morgan-Jones 2009). ...
Article
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The success and longevity of coalition governments depends on the ability to keep conflicts between coalition members at bay. The risk of such conflicts is often assessed by drawing on proxy measures, such as the ideological heterogeneity among government parties. This article presents a new approach to measuring the atmosphere between government parties. The ‘coalition mood’ is a time-varying measure that draws on applause patterns between coalition partners during legislative debates. The article exemplifies the measurement approach based on automated analyses of over 105,000 plenary debates in Germany and Austria. The article then assesses the measure's face, concurrent and predictive validity. It finds the measure well aligned with qualitative evidence, shows that the coalition mood is correlated with poll ratings of the government parties and helps to predict the duration of legislative processes. The conclusion highlights future applications of the coalition mood for research on coalition politics and public policy.
... This is because these organizations tend to have compatible political aspirations, that is, a minimum common denominator in terms of political goals and values. Like ideologically aligned political parties in the context of government coalition formation (Martin and Stevenson 2001), rebel groups with a shared ideological constituency would be relatively likely to agree on a plan of action satisfying their key aspirations-thus preserving their autonomy-and would incur modest negotiation costs to come to an agreement. Rebel organizations with a common ideological constituency would also typically expect little opposition to an alliance from their supporters and members, as they would likely see such an alliance as furthering the interests and values that brought them to support or join the organizations in the first place. ...
Article
Challenging influential perspectives that downplay the role of shared rebel constituencies, we argue that they represent important causes of rebel alliances. Yet, we theorize distinct effects for different types of constituency. While compatible political aspirations push both organizations with a common ideological constituency and those with a common ethnic constituency to ally, for co-ethnic organizations this cooperation-inducing effect is offset by a cooperation-suppressing effect due to their higher risk of inter-rebel war. Leveraging a novel dataset of alliances in multiparty civil wars (1946–2015), we find support for our theoretical expectations. Shared ideological constituencies have a larger and more robust positive effect on the probability of alliances than shared ethnic constituencies. Furthermore, we find that co-ethnic rebel organizations tend to establish informal alliances only, while organizations sharing an ideological constituency are drawn to formal alliances.
... Jennings and Wlezien (2016) collected the original polling data for the second, which we then augmented and extended (see the list of alternative sources in online Appendix C). Our end result is CIPs for the parties in the 21 parliamentary democracies and in the periods listed in Table 1. 8 Our dataset for the first step-choosing the best model of government formation-contains 116,484 potential cabinets that could have formed in 454 different formation opportunities, that is, either post-election or post-cabinet termination bargaining situations as defined by Martin and Stevenson (2001). 9 To support out-of-sample testing, we randomly select and set aside approximately 20 percent of our sample of formation opportunities in which no single party had a majority (i.e., 18,100 potential cabinets in 62 formation opportunities). ...
Article
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Policy in coalition governments (a) depends on negotiations between parties that (b) continue between elections. No extant means of predicting policy—bargaining power indices, vote shares, seat shares, polling, veto players or measures of electoral competitiveness—recognizes both of these facts. We conceptualize, estimate and validate the first dynamic measure of parties’ bargaining leverage intended to predict policy and politics. We argue that those parties with the greatest leverage in policy negotiations are those with the highest probability of participating in an alternative government, were one to form. Combining a large set of political polls and an empirical coalition formation model developed with out-of-sample testing, we estimate coalition inclusion probabilities for parties in a sample of 21 parliamentary democracies at a monthly frequency over four decades. Applications to government spending and to the stringency of environmental policy show leverage from coalition inclusion probabilities to be strongly predictive while the primary alternatives—vote shares, seat shares and polls—are not.
... Of course, a host of other variables influence cabinet formation and thus need to be controlled for. To do so, we follow the standard approach to modeling cabinet formation in political science (Druckman et al. 2005;Martin and Stevenson 2001). We use conditional logit regression models to estimate how the various properties of all governments that could form-all potential governments-affect their relative probabilities of being chosen as the actual design matters 119 government. ...
Chapter
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This chapter discusses the conditions under which semi-parliamentary government can be stable. It responds to two conjectures about “strong” bicameralism: that constitutional designers who prefer strong second chambers have to be willing to accept (a) either a presidential system of government; or (b) oversized and ideologically heterogeneous cabinets. Both conjectures are largely unfounded because they neglect that second chambers can be designed to be powerful in the legislative process, but permissive with respect to cabinet formation. The chapter measures second chambers’ “restrictiveness” with respect to cabinet formation as a neglected dimension of bicameral designs and uses the resulting indices to explain comparative patterns of cabinet formation and constitutional reform. A conditional logit analyses of cabinet formation in 28 democratic systems in the period 1975–2018 shows that governments’ potential control of a second-chamber majority only affects cabinet formation when the chamber in question is restrictive. A comparative analysis of patterns of constitutional reform and stability in twelve bicameral systems suggests that reducing the restrictiveness of a second chamber—rather than its democratic legitimacy or legislative veto power—can be sufficient to stabilize a “strong” second chamber.
... Of course, a host of other variables influence cabinet formation and thus need to be controlled for. To do so, we follow the standard approach to modeling cabinet formation in political science (Druckman et al. 2005;Martin and Stevenson 2001). We use conditional logit regression models to estimate how the various properties of all governments that could form-all potential governments-affect their relative probabilities of being chosen as the actual design matters 119 government. ...
Book
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In a democracy, a constitutional separation of powers between the executive and the assembly may be desirable, but the constitutional concentration of executive power in a single human being is not. The book defends this thesis and explores ‘semi-parliamentary government’ as an alternative to presidential government. Semi-parliamentarism avoids power concentration in one person by shifting the separation of powers into the democratic assembly. The executive becomes fused with only one part of the assembly, even though the other part has at least equal democratic legitimacy and robust veto power on ordinary legislation. The book identifies the Australian Commonwealth and Japan, as well as the Australian states of New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia, as semi-parliamentary systems. Using data from 23 countries and 6 Australian states, it maps how parliamentary and semi-parliamentary systems balance competing visions of democracy; it analyzes patterns of electoral and party systems, cabinet formation, legislative coalition-building, and constitutional reforms; it systematically compares the semi-parliamentary and presidential separation of powers; and it develops new and innovative semi-parliamentary designs, some of which do not require two separate chambers.
... How does cabinet composition impact the cabinet decision-making process? While government formation is well-studied (see Laver, 1998;Martin and Stevenson, 2001), the question of how composition impacts 'the process through which executive cabinets reach their final governmental outputs' has received less treatment (Vercesi, 2020, 438). This article assesses the relationship between cabinet composition and cabinet decision-making in the arena of cabinet committees: groups of ministers tasked with policy or coordination responsibilities. ...
Article
This article examines one arena of decision-making in cabinet government: cabinet committees. It assesses the relationship between the composition of cabinets – their party make-up – and the structure of cabinet committees. Cabinet committees are groups of ministers tasked with specific policy or coordination responsibilities and can be important mechanisms of policymaking and cabinet management. Thus, the structure of committees informs our understanding of how cabinets differ in their distributions of policy influence among ministers and parties, a central concern in parliamentary government. We investigate two such dimensions: collegiality – interaction among ministers – and collectivity, the (de)centralization of influence. We find that cabinet committees in coalitions are significantly more collegial, on average, than single-party cabinets, though this is driven by minority coalitions. At the same time, influence within cabinet committees is less collectively distributed in most types of coalitions than in single-party cabinets.
... Der Ausgang des Koalitionsbildungsprozesses hängt nicht nur von den institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen ab, sondern auch von den Strategien, die den individuellen Nutzen der Parteien maximieren (Laver und Schofield 1998;Martin und Stevenson 2001). Um ihre Ziele bestmöglich durchzusetzen, streben Parteien nach der Kontrolle über möglichst viele Ämter und nach der Implementation möglichst vieler von ihnen versprochener Politikinhalte. ...
Article
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Zusammenfassung Das komplexer gewordene bundesdeutsche Parteiensystem und die Angleichung in der Stärke der Parteien bei Wahlen führt zu einem ebenfalls komplexeren Koalitions- und Regierungsbildungsprozess auf Bundes- wie Landesebene. Diese Kurzanalyse präsentiert die programmatischen Profile der im Bundestag vertretenen Parteien auf der Grundlage ihrer zur Bundestagswahl 2021 verfassten Wahlprogramme. Im Anschluss daran wird – auf der Basis der Determinanten der Regierungs- und Koalitionsbildung in Deutschland in den Bundesländern und auf Bundesebene seit 1990 – mit Rückgriff auf unterschiedliche Szenarien der Sitzverteilung im 20. Deutschen Bundestag, die neben den sich aus dem Wahlergebnis ergebenden Parteienkonstellationen auch andere Koalitionsoptionen umfassen, die jeweils wahrscheinlichste Regierungskoalition ermittelt. Die Ergebnisse verdeutlichen, dass die Regierungsbildung in Deutschland von office- und policy-orientierten Koalitionstheorien sowie den institutionell-kontextuellen Rahmenbedingungen entscheidend beeinflusst wird und eine „Ampelkoalition“ das wahrscheinlichste Ergebnis des Regierungsbildungsprozesses 2021 ist, wenn eine „große Koalition“ aus Union und SPD als ausgeschlossen betrachtet wird.
... A party's seat share should be more decisive for forming a coalition if adding this party to a coalition changes the coalition characteristic from a minority to a majority coalition. However, if a potential coalition already has a majority status, adding an additional party (regardless of the size of the party) turns this coalition to a surplus majority coalition and, thus, should decrease the formation likelihood of this coalition (see Martin and Stevenson 2001). Hence, the effect of party size is captured as a curvilinear relationship by including both the size of a coalition (seat share coalition) and the squared value of this variable (seat share coalition squared). ...
Article
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Coalition governments prevail at the European subnational level. Although some studies explain the formation of subnational government coalitions, we know little about the determinants of individual parties' likelihood of joining such coalitions. This article aims to fill this gap in empirical and theoretical ways. It shows that an important institutional constraint matters for political actors' strategies when forming subnational coalitions: the party affiliation of the directly elected head of the executive. Being the party of the head of the executive or being ideologically close to that party significantly increases a party's likelihood of joining a coalition. The empirical evidence results from multinomial choice models using a novel data set on subnational parties' likelihood of joining 92 coalition governments at the local level in Germany between 1999 and 2016. The findings have substantive implications for subnational institutional settings resembling ‘mixed’ political systems (i.e. neither purely presidential nor purely parliamentarian).
... Their authors clearly state from the outset that they aim to test the outcomes of formal models via some statistical method. 9 What matters here is how one derives hypotheses from the formal model (Diermeier and Martin and Stevenson 2001;Becher and Flemming 2015), how one measures specific concepts entailed in the model's structure (Eyerman and Hart 1996;Partell and Palmer 1999;Ansolabehere et al. 2005;Tomz 2007), or even how the results of the test are interpreted vis-à-vis the formal model (Laver and Shepsle 1996;Signorino 2003Signorino , 2007Dewan and Spirling 2011). For some critics, such statistical models do not test formal models because they shift the formal model's parameters. ...
Article
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James Johnson argues that formal models are best conceived as fables which provide lessons about empirical phenomena and the “standard rationale” of testing model predictions fails. Without justifying the “standard rationale” as such, we argue that models produce scientific predictions. These predictions come at different levels or granularity of description and in different forms each bearing some degree of uncertainty, but still give conditions for the existence of political phenomena. Models and their predictions require projection onto the world, and that projection involves interpretation. Tests utilize inference to the best explanation, and it is the conceptual or theoretical aspect of models that make them explanatory. We discuss the extent to which our characterisation of models and their explanatory form versus that of Johnson constitutes a verbal or substantive dispute.
... These incentives can generate principal-agent problems in government policy making between ministers and their coalition partners, especially when the policy divergence of coalition parties increases (Martin and Vanberg 2005;Müller and Strøm 1999;Strøm and Müller 2000;Strøm, Müller, and Bergman 2003). These problems continue to exist despite attempts to alleviate them via screening of coalition partners (Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991;Saalfeld 2000;Strøm 1995;, ministerial portfolio allocation (Bäck, Debus, and Dumont 2011;Bassi 2013;Laver and Schofield 1990;Laver and Shepsle 1996;Martin and Stevenson 2001), and formal agreements on coalition compromise (Bäck, Müller, and Nyblade 2017;Bowler et al. 2016;Indridason and Kristinsson 2013;Klüver and Bäck 2019;Moury 2013;Müller and Strøm 1999;2008;Strøm and Müller 2000;Timmermans 2017). ...
Article
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Although democratic governance imposes temporal constraints, the timing of government policy making activities such as bill initiation is still poorly understood. This holds especially under coalition governments, in which government bills need to find approval by a partner party in parliament. We propose a dynamic temporal perspective in which ministers do not know whether they face a cooperative or competitive partner at the beginning of a term, but they learn this over time and use their agenda control to time further bill initiation in response. A circular regression analysis using data on more than 25,000 government bills from 11 parliamentary democracies over 30 years supports this temporal perspective, showing that ministers initiate bills later in the term when their previous bills have experienced greater scrutiny. Ministers further delay bill initiation when coalition parties’ incentives to deviate from compromise increase and when they have less power to constrain their bills’ scrutiny.
... For a vote-seeking party, this is a way of maximising votes. Maximising votes is also attractive for office-seeking parties as the party's size affects its chances of entering office (Martin and Stevenson 2001). In the case of coalition governments, votes are also associated with the allocation of ministerial portfolios, i.e. a party's share of office benefits (Warwick and Druckman 2006). ...
Article
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Although research on interest group influence has had a revival in recent decades, little is known about interest group influence on political parties. This study considers how parties’ goals can affect interest groups’ ability to influence these actors. Interest groups are expected to be more likely to influence parties that are ideologically approximate to the interest groups as well as parties that are more willing to make policy compromises; the access that interest groups have to parties mediates these effects. Results from the empirical analysis of 5000 party-interest group observations from Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom support these expectations. In addition to contributing to the literature on parties and interest groups, the findings shed light on party position taking and when the link between citizens and parties is likely to be affected by interest groups. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1921496 .
... Of course, a host of other variables influence cabinet formation and thus need to be controlled for. To do so, we follow the standard approach to modeling cabinet formation in political science (Druckman et al. 2005;Martin and Stevenson 2001). We use conditional logit regression models to estimate how the various properties of all governments that could form-all potential governments-affect their relative probabilities of being chosen as the actual design matters 119 government. ...
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მოცემული კვლევის მიზანია, შეისწავლოს საქართველოში საარჩევნო ბლოკის ინსტიტუტის როლი პარტიული სისტემის ინსტიტუციონალიზაციის სისუსტეში. კვლევა მეინვერინგისა და სქალის ინსტიტუციონალიზაციის ოთხი განზომილებიდან წინასაარჩევნო კოალიციების ხელშემშლელ მექანიზმს განიხილავს სამის - ელექტორალური არასტაბილურობის, საზოგადოებაში პარტიის ფესვებისა და პარტიული ორგანიზაციის ლიდერებისგან დამოუკიდებლობის ფარგლებში (Mainwaring & Scully, 1995). 1990-2020 წლებში საქართველოში ჩატარებული ათი საპარლამენტო არჩევნების შედეგების შესწავლამ აჩვენა საარჩევნო ბლოკების ელექტორალური არამდგრადობის ძლიერი დადებითი კორელაცია საერთო საარჩევნო არასტაბილურობის მიმართ. კვლევის ფარგლებში, გამოვლინდა ჰეტეროგენურ წინასაარჩევნო კოალიციაში შესვლის გამო ამომრჩევლის მიერ პარტიის დასჯის ცალკეული შემთხვევებიც. თუმცა, არ დადასტურდა საქართველოში იდეოლოგიურ საფუძველზე ხმის მიცემის ხშირი პრაქტიკა. ელექტორალურად წარმატებული საარჩევნო ბლოკების ანალიზმა გამოავლინა მათ შორის დომინანტური პარტიის ლიდერის გამოკვეთილი როლიც, რამაც საარჩევნო ბლოკებს პერსონიფიცირებისკენ უბიძგა და შეზღუდა ალიანსში პარტიების თანასწორად განვითარების შესაძლებლობა. მთლიანობაში, ეს სამი ფაქტორი ხელს უშლიდა პარტიული სისტემის ინსტიტუციონალიზაციას. ამასთან, საარჩევნო ბლოკებს დადებითი როლი გააჩნდათ ქვეყანაში პოლიტიკური კონკურენციის ხარისხობრივი გაზრდისა და არაპროპორციულობის შეზღუდვის თვალსაზრისით. უკრაინის შემთხვევის ანალიზმა, აგრეთვე, გამოკვეთა საარჩევნო ბლოკის ინსტიტუტის აკრძალვის ნეგატიური შედეგები პოლიტიკური სისტემის მიმართ, რაც საქართველოში პრობლემის ამგვარადვე გადაწყვეტის შესაძლო ეფექტების მიმართ მომავალში დაკვირვების მნიშვნელობას ნათელყოფს. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of the electoral bloc institution in Georgia in weakening the institutionalization of the party system. The study examines the interference mechanism of pre-election coalitions from four dimensions of institutionalization outlined by Mainwaring and Scully within the framework of electoral instability, party roots in society, and independence from party organization leaders (Mainwaring & Scully, 1995). An analysis of the results of ten parliamentary elections held in Georgia between 1990 and 2020 revealed a strong positive correlation between the electoral instability of electoral blocs and overall electoral instability. The research also identified individual cases of voter punishment towards parties for joining heterogeneous pre-election coalitions. However, the frequent practice of ideologically based voting in Georgia was not confirmed. Analysis of electorally successful electoral blocs highlighted the distinct role of the dominant party leader among them, pushing electoral blocs to personify and limiting the possibility of equal development of parties in the alliance. Overall, these three factors hindered the institutionalization of the party system. Meanwhile, electoral blocs played a positive role in improving the quality of political competition in the country and limiting disproportionality. Examination of the case of Ukraine also emphasized the negative consequences of banning the electoral bloc institution on the political system, underscoring the importance of considering potential effects of such a solution to the problem in Georgia in the future.
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