Coalition Formation Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Coalition formation occupies a central place in the study of party politics and behavior, as well as the formation of governments. Coalition formation in this context is understood as the result of the process of bargaining between political parties (and their leaders), either before or after elections, to form alliances in order to attain and preserve power.

Early scholarship adopted rational choice theory as its framework of reference to account for why and how coalitions form. A key concern appeared to be the importance of size in the formation of coalitions, with later studies shifting attention to the coalition’s internal bargaining process. In this regard, office-seeking and policy-seeking theories have defined classical research on coalition formation from the postwar period to the early 1980s. In both approaches, the focus lies on who (or how many) will form the coalition and how long this will last.

The most influential office-seeking theories are the minimal winning coalition theory, the minimum-winning coalition theory, and the bargaining proposition theory. According to John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s minimal winning coalition theory, a coalition is expected to form at the minimal level below which the coalition government would fail if any of its members were to defect from the coalition itself. Building on the minimal-winning coalition theory, William Riker’s minimum-winning coalition theory contends that parties would enter a coalition commanding just over 50 percent of legislative seats to secure office. In Michael Leiserson’s bargain proposition theory, efficient coalitions would be those where only the smallest number of parties join the coalition.

Policy-seeking coalition theories have contributed a greater predictive and explanatory power to coalition formation scholarship. Robert Axelrod’s minimal connected winning theory (MCW) showed how coalitions would be formed by those actors whose party of affiliation is minimally connected on a single ideological dimension; this kind of coalition would show greater durability, reducing the potential for conflict between the coalition members. Abram De Swaan’s closed coalition theory builds on the MCW and highlights how coalitions would form between parties showing the smallest ideological distance.

Two main theoretical innovations have contributed to the growth of coalition formation scholarship in recent years. First, since the 1980s a neoinstitutionalist critique to the dominance of rational choice theory in the study of coalition formation has emphasized that coalition bargaining power is constrained by institutions, including cabinet formation and operation rules, legislative and party rules, and external veto players. Institutions influence the behavior of political actors in their bargaining or decision-making procedures when they form coalitions and allocate portfolios. According to Wolfgang Müller and Kaare Strøm, institutions such as investiture rules or other parliamentary rules have an effect on coalition formation and size.

In addition, multidimensional coalition formation models have moved beyond the traditional single dimension—left-to-right scale—and propose that coalitions would form among parties located within the smallest distance in multiple policies dimensions. According to the core theory, parties stay in the core area of two dimensional policy spaces, and policies can be predicted by observing the behavior of the core party. Ian Budge and Hans Keman contend that if the core party or parties are structurally stable, the coalition government would be able to remain longer in office; unstable core parties would otherwise generate short-lived coalitions and fluctuating policies. Seeking to identify the ideal points among parties’ policy preferences in multidimensional policy spaces, Michael Laver and Kenneth Shepsle argue that the ideal point of the median voter is the only point where the majority of voters converge on a given policy issue.

Although the literature has traditionally paid attention to the formation of coalition governments in parliamentary systems, scholars have recently also begun to include the study of coalitions in presidential and semi-presidential systems. One of the central assumptions in coalition formation studies (that political parties be viewed as unitary actors) has also come under criticism due to its neglect of intraparty processes.

Empirically, attention is now being paid to systems outside the traditional geographic areas of interest (Western Europe and the United States). Since the advent of the third wave of democratization, coalition formation has become a tool for political parties to achieve electoral success in East Central Europe, East Asia, and Latin America, resulting in the creation of new empirical data and fresh theoretical insights into the study of why and how coalitions form.

Bibliography:

Budge, Ian, and Hans Keman. Parties and Democracy: Coalition Formation and Government Functioning in Twenty States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Laver, Michael, and Norman Schofield. Multi Government: The Politics of Coalition in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Laver, Michael, and Kenneth Shepsle. Making and Breaking Governments: Cabinets and Legislature in Parliamentary Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Müller, Wolfgang, and Kaare Strøm. Coalition Governments in Western Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.