Gaining new insights by going local: determinants of coalition formation in mixed democratic polities

Groß, Martin; Debus, Marc

doi:10.1007/s11127-017-0489-x

Cited by 21 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 74 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…8 Note that the institutional setting at the German local level with a directly elected mayor and a local council is a neither a pure presidential nor a pure parliamentarian system (Bäck, 2005;Egner 2015) but rather a 'mixed democracy' (Gross and Debus, 2018a) or 'institutional hybrid' (Egner, 2015) between a 'quasi-presidential' (Benz and Zimmer, 2011;Egner and Stoiber, 2008) or a 'semi-presidential' (Debus and Gross, 2016;Bäck, 2005) government system, depending on which German state authors are primarily basing their analysis on. This does not change, however, the equivalence of local coalition agreements to coalition agreements at the federal and state level because local government parties can still shape policy-making and portfolio allocation at the local level, even if the directly elected mayor is from an opposing party.…”

Section: Data and Measurementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topic Coverage of Coalition Agreements in Multi-Level Settings: The Case of Germany

Groß¹,

Krauss

2019

German Politics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

When analysing coalition agreements, scholars mostly concentrate on those agreements that are written at the national level. However, there is also a considerable amount of coalition agreements that are written at sub-national levels. This paper analyses the commonalities and differences in coalition agreements in the German multi-level system at the national, regional and local level. From a legal jurisdiction perspective, one would expect that there are major differences across political levels in the topics covered in the agreements. From a multi-level governance perspective, however, one would additionally expect that government parties also devote their attention to policy domains that lie outside their realm of legislative decision-making. We take Germany as a prime example for a political system characterized by joint decision-making authorities within cooperative federalism. Combining data from the Political Documents Archive (www.polidoc.net) with newly data from the Local Manifesto Project (LMP; www.localpartymanifestos.de), we analyse nearly 200 coalition agreements at the national, regional and local level in Germany by applying quantitative text analysis techniques. The empirical results show that governing parties mostly talk about the policy areas they are legally responsible for. However, particularly local and regional governing parties also address issues that are primarily part of federal jurisdiction.

show abstract

Section: Data and Measurementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topic Coverage of Coalition Agreements in Multi-Level Settings: The Case of Germany

Groß¹,

Krauss

2019

German Politics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Research on sub-national party competition in the governmental arena only recently gained momentum. Scholars increasingly focus on the incentives for political actors stemming from the interplay between different political levels in multi-level systems in government formation (Bäck et al 2013;Däubler and Debus 2009;Debus and Gross 2016;Falcó-Gimeno, Forthcoming;Gross and Debus 2018;Stefuriuc 2013).…”

Section: Challenges For Dual Accountability In the Governmental Arenamentioning

confidence: 99%

Party competition and dual accountability in multi-level systems

Baumann

Ecker

Groß³

2020

Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Sub-national self-governance is on the rise across European democracies. This increasing decentralization changes party competition in multi-level governance systems, and has broad implications for voters' ability to assign political responsibility and to hold politicians accountable. Regarding the interplay between party competition and dual accountabilitythat is, the attribution of accountability to the relevant levelin multi-level governance systems, we propose to distinguish conceptually between an electoral and a governmental arena. Whereas dual accountability in the electoral arena is challenged by varying degrees of party system nationalization, the governmental arena is characterized by a trade-off between the wish for clear-cut dual accountability and the need for political stability. We discuss these challenges in detail and link the various contributions in this special issue to these challenges. We add to the existing literature that increasingly deals with the theoretical and empirical challenges of electoral accountability in ever more institutionally complex systems of multi-level governance.

show abstract

“…State parties' manifestos for several state elections in Hesse (1991)(1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009) and in North Rhine- Westphalia (1990Westphalia ( -2010 have been retrieved from the Political Documents Archive (Benoit et al 2009;Gross and Debus 2018b) and used as 'reference texts'. In line with previous research on subnational party positions in Germany, the respective 'reference scores' to the 'reference texts' are state parties' policy positions on a general left-right dimension (see Bräuninger et al 2020;Gross and Debus 2018a). Local election manifestos have been retrieved from the Local Manifesto Project (Gross and Jankowski 2020).…”

Section: Case Selection Data and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Regarding the coalition-level characteristics and the incumbency factor, the findings lend further evidence to recent findings in national and subnational government formation research (cf. Debus and Gross 2016; Falcó-Gimeno 2020; Glasgow and Golder 2015; Gross and Debus 2018a; Olislagers and Steyvers 2015): minimal winning coalitions are more likely to be formed, whereas coalitions are the less likely, the more parties they comprise. Furthermore, incumbent parties have a lesser chance of re-entering government if they are not able to renew their cooperation, because it is the incumbent coalition that has a positive and statistically significant probability of being formed again.…”

Section: Empirical Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Determinants of Government Membership at the Subnational Level: Empirical Evidence from Large Cities in Germany (1999–2016)

Groß¹

2021

Gov. & oppos.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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).

show abstract

Gaining new insights by going local: determinants of coalition formation in mixed democratic polities

Cited by 21 publications

References 74 publications

Topic Coverage of Coalition Agreements in Multi-Level Settings: The Case of Germany

Topic Coverage of Coalition Agreements in Multi-Level Settings: The Case of Germany

Party competition and dual accountability in multi-level systems

Determinants of Government Membership at the Subnational Level: Empirical Evidence from Large Cities in Germany (1999–2016)

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About