Pre-electoral coalition formation in parliamentary democracies

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 193-212

  Golder, Sona Nadenichek ^a  

^a FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33644899142     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123406000123     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. G. Bingham Powell, Elections as Instruments of Democracy: Majoritarian and Proportional Visions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000).
2. John Huber, Rationalizing Parliament (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 185.
3. Powell, Elections as Instruments of Democracy.
4. Jan De Jong and Bert Pijnenburg, 'The Dutch Christian Democratic Party and Coalitional Behaviour in the Netherlands: A Pivotal Party in the Face of Depillarisation', in Jeffrey Pridham, ed., Coalitional Behaviour in Theory and in Practice: An Inductive Model for Western Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 145-70;
5. Paul Mitchell, 'Government Formation: A Tale of Two Coalitions', in Michael Marsh and Paul Mitchell, eds, How Ireland Voted 1997 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1999), pp. 243-63;
6. Thomas Saalfeld, 'Germany: Stable Parties, Chancellor Democracy, and the Art of Informal Settlement', in Wolfgang C. Müller and Kaare Strøm, eds, Coalition Governments in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 32-85.
7. Kaare Strøm and Wolfgang C. Müller, 'The Keys to Togetherness: Coalition Agreements in Parliamentary Democracies', in Lawrence D. Longley and Reuven Y. Hazen, eds, The Uneasy Relationship Between Parliamentary Members and Leaders (London: Frank Cass, 2000), pp. 255-82.
8. In the conclusion of his recent book, G. Bingham Powell notes: 'One area that cries out for more serious theoretical and empirical work is the appearance of announced preelectoral coalitions between political parties. We know too little about the origins of such coalitions and about the great variety of forms (shared manifestos, withdrawal of coalition partners, recommendations to voters) that they can take. But in a number of countries such coalitions unmistakably play a critical role at both the electoral and legislative levels.' (Powell, Elections as Instruments of Democracy, p. 247); see also
9. Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, 2nd edn (New York: John Wiley, 1957).
10. For nice overviews of the vast empirical and formal literatures examining coalition behaviour, see Lanny W. Martin and Randy Stevenson, 'Government Formation in Parliamentary Democracies', American Journal of Political Science, 45 (2001), 33-50; and
11. Michael Laver, 'Models of Government Coordination', Annual Review of Political Science, 1 (1998), 1-25.
12. David Hanley, 'Compromise, Party Management and Fair Shares: The Case of the French UDF', Party Politics, 5 (1999), 171-89; Mitchell, 'Government Formation'; Saalfeld, 'Germany'.
13. Martin and Stevenson, 'Government Formation in Parliamentary Democracies'. Kaminski uses a co-operative game-theoretic model to examine pre-electoral coalitions and mergers in Poland in the 1990s. However, his analysis has not been extended to other cases and does not take account of bargaining or policy issues
14. Marek Kaminski, 'Coalitional Stability of Multi-Party Systems: Evidence from Poland', American Journal of Political Science, 45 (2001), 294-312).
15. There are, of course, finer distinctions that could be made among the various types of electoral coalition. For example, one might argue that coalitions composed of parties with different geographical bases of support are different from those composed of parties that normally compete in the same districts. There are only two such cases in my dataset (the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Socialist Union in Germany, and the National and Liberal parties in Australia), and their exclusion does not affect the inferences drawn in this article. In fact, I was forced to treat the Christian Democrats as a single party because the policy data I used coded them as such. In the Australian case, I re-estimated the models of coalition formation after receding the electoral coalition as a single party; the results were qualitatively similar to those presented in this article. In general, given the limited research on pre-electoral coalitions, my main focus is on the defining characteristic of a pre-electoral coalition - that parties do not compete independently - rather than on the various ways in which these coalitions can be disaggregated.
16. Parties may feel constrained in their coalition choices even after the election because they recognize that they will have to face the electorate again in the future. However, if party leaders think that a particular 'incompatible' coalition is likely to be successful in office, they may gamble that voters will not punish them in the next elections.
17. Müller and Strøm, 'Political Parties and Hard Choices'.
18. In cases where nomination agreements (to pick a single coalition candidate per district) are not necessary, and where parties can get away with vague coalition policy statements during the campaign, parties may be able to wait until after the election to proceed with more detailed bargaining. In this case, the parties are not likely to face larger costs for negotiating an electoral coalition before the election than they do afterwards.
19. I do not claim that pre-electoral coalitions will always be electorally advantageous. After all, it may be the case that a coalition is composed of parties that are so ideologically incompatible that their respective electorates refuse to vote for the coalition.
20. James M. Snyder Jr and Michael M. Ting, 'An Informational Rationale for Political Parties', American Journal of Political Science, 46 (2002), 90-110;
21. James Enelow and Melvin J. Hinich, 'A New Approach to Voter Uncertainty in the Downsian Spatial Model', American Journal of Political Science, 25 (1981), 483-93.
22. William Roberts Clark and Matt Golder, 'Rehabilitating Duverger's Theory: Testing the Mechanical and Strategic Modifying Effects of Electoral Laws', Comparative Political Studies, 39 (2006), forthcoming;
23. Gary W. Cox, Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
24. Arend Lijphart, Electoral Systems and Party Systems: A Study of Twenty-Seven Democracies 1945-1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994);
25. Duverger, Political Parties.
26. Ian Budge and M. J. Laver, 'Coalition Theory, Government Policy and Party Policy', in Ian Budge and M. J. Laver, eds, Party Policy and Government Coalitions (New York: St Martin's Press, 1992).
27. Parties that care a great deal about policy would be willing to give up more office benefits in order to keep a relatively extreme government out of power than would parties that are equally concerned with both policy and office benefits.
28. The countries included are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. I do not include Israel or Greece because data were not available for all of the relevant variables.
29. While some scholars conducting cross-national analyses have addressed electoral coalitions, these coalitions have never been their primary focus (Powell, Elections as Instruments of Democracy; Martin and Stevenson, 'Government Formation in Parliamentary Democracies'). Moreover, the information collected on various aspects of these coalitions is quite limited. For example, Martin and Stevenson identify only fourteen elections out of the 170 in their sample (about 8 per cent) as having a pre-electoral coalition. In fact, I have identified that there were actually sixty-nine elections that had pre-electoral coalitions in their sample (about 41 per cent).
30. Dyadic data are also the format of choice in the international relations literature addressing coalition or alliance behaviour.
31. 'Government potential' refers to a party that is a former, actual, or (realistically) possible member of government. 'Blackmail potential' refers to a party that is able to affect the tactics of party competition among government-oriented parties (Ian Budge el al., Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments 1945-1998 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 216.
32. The Budge et al. criteria are drawn, in turn, from Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
33. Gary King and Langche Zeng, 'Explaining Rare Events in International Relations', International Organization, 55 (2001), 693-715.
34. Budge et al., Mapping Policy Preferences.
35. Lijphart, Electoral Systems and Party Systems. The effective threshold is the mean of the threshold of representation and exclusion. It is calculated as (50%/(M+ 1)) + (50%/2M), where M is the district magnitude. If there are legal thresholds and/or upper-tier seats, the calculation is slightly more complicated. See
36. Rein Taagepera, 'Effective Magnitude and Effective Threshold', Electoral Studies, 17 (1998), 393-404;
37. Rein Taagepera, 'Nationwide Inclusion and Exclusion Thresholds of Representation', Electoral Studies, 17 (1998), 405-17. The effective electoral threshold ranges from a low of 0.7 in the Netherlands since 1956 to a high of 35 in countries with single-member districts such as Canada and the United Kingdom.
38. Cox, Making Votes Count;
39. Rein Taagepera and Matthew Shugart, Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989);
40. Douglas Rae, The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967).
41. Qualitatively similar results to those presented here are found if the log of average district magnitude is used instead of effective thresholds.
42. The largest pre-electoral coalition to form occurred in the Austrian elections of 1959 between the People's party and the Socialist party. Between them, the coalition members controlled 95 per cent of the legislative seats.
43. William H. Greene, Econometric Analysis, 5th edn (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2003);
44. Cheng Hsiao, Analysis of Panel Data, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
45. 2 statistic of this magnitude or larger if the random effects are not required is less than 0.0001 with one degree of freedom. This strongly suggests that random effects should be retained.
46. Gary King, Michael Tomz and Jason Wittenberg, 'Making the Most of Statistical Analyses: Improving Interpretation and Presentation', American Journal of Political Science, 44 (2000), 341-55.
47. Thomas Brambor, William Roberts Clark and Matt Golder, 'Understanding Interaction Models: Improving Empirical Analyses', Political Analysis, 14 (2006), 63-82.
48. Confidence intervals are based on simulations using 10,000 draws from the estimated coefficient vector and variance-covariance matrix.
49. One might also wonder about the predictive power of my analysis. As with all rare event data, the predicted probability of a pre-electoral coalition forming is quite low (King and Zeng, 'Explaining Rare Events in International Relations'). However, the results from my analysis show that the mean predicted probability of an electoral coalition forming for those dyads that actually did form an electoral coalition (0.10) is twice as large as the mean predicted probability for those dyads that did not form a coalition (0.05). The fact that simulations show that we can be highly confident (greater than 99 per cent) that these mean predicted probabilities are different provides support for the predictive power of my analysis.
50. King and Zeng, 'Explaining Rare Events in International Relations', p. 711.
51. Kenneth Shepsle and Mark S. Bonchek, Analyzing Politics: Rationality, Behavior, and Institutions (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997);
52. Michael Laver and Norman Schofield, Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Europe, 2nd edn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).
53. Kaare Strøm, Ian Budge and Michael J. Laver, 'Constraints on Cabinet Formation in Parliamentary Democracies', American Journal of Political Science, 38 (1994), 303-35, p. 316.
54. Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left: Essays on Labour and Politics in France, 1830-1981 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
55. Powell, Elections as Instruments of Democracy.
56. I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.