Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation in Parliamentary Democracies

Abstract

Political parties that wish to exercise executive power in parliamentary democracies are typically forced to enter some form of coalition. Parties can either form a pre-electoral coalition prior to election or they can compete independently and form a government coalition afterwards. While there is a vast literature on government coalitions, little is known about pre-electoral coalitions. A systematic analysis of these coalitions using a new dataset constructed by the author and presented here contains information on all potential pre-electoral coalition dyads in twenty industrialized parliamentary democracies from 1946 to 1998. Pre-electoral coalitions are more likely to form between ideologically compatible parties. They are also more likely to form when the expected coalition size is large (but not too large) and the potential coalition partners are similar in size. Finally, they are more likely to form if the party system is ideologically polarized and the electoral rules are disproportional.

Weighting Parties and Coalitions: How Coalition Signals Influence Voting Behavior

“…Empirically, preelectoral coalitions and preelectoral coordination are fairly common among parties during campaigns (Golder 2005(Golder , 2006. Very common are joint campaign events or press conference in which the respective party leaders appear side by side.…”

“…In practice, coalition signals can offer crucial information to voters (Gschwend, Stoetzer, and Zittlau 2016). As one preelectoral coalition strategy (Golder 2005(Golder , 2006, coalition signals may provide guidance about which coalition governments are conceivable politically and likely to gain a majority in parliament. They reduce the number of theoretically possible coalitions to a manageable range and help citizens to form clearer expectations about the government formation process after the election.…”

Corruption and power in democracies

“…Neither of these arguments work in our model: in particular, the equilibrium-based solution concept precludes any strategic uncertainty. Golder (2006) tests further hypotheses derived from an informal discussion of pre-electoral negotiations. We provide a complete model of pre-and post-electoral bargaining, which shows how parties may precommit in order to allow corrupt parties to share power.…”

Inter-Party Conflict Management in Coalition Governments: Analyzing the Role of Coalition Agreements in Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands

“…Whereas the Italian coalition agreements were drafted before the elections, this always happened after the elections in the other three countries. Moreover, the Schroder II government distinguished itself from its Dutch, Belgian and German counterparts by its composition: a large and a small party that had already shown willingness to coalesce during the election campaign (but did not write a formal coalition agreement at this stage [41] Although the number of case studies is limited, we expect this approach to be replicable for other coalition governments in the four countries and in a broader set of countries with government coalitions-thus allowing more analytical generalization beyond the findings we present in this contribution. Table 1 shows the content of coalition agreements of the eleven governments, i.e.…”