“…The mainstream of coalition research follows a context-sensitive rational choice approach. Hence, scholars believe that coalition formation results from parties' strategic choices in the pursuit of office and policy, which are constrained by contextual factors, such as the institutional environment, the configuration of party systems or historical trajectories ( de Swaan 1973;Strøm 1990a;Strøm, Budge, and Laver 1994;Müller andStrøm 1999, 2000b;Kropp, Schüttemeyer, and Sturm 2002a;Mitchell and Nyblade 2008).…”