Coalition Theory Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This example Coalition Theory Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Coalitions are “governments in which different parties commit themselves to serving together in the same cabinet and sharing the portfolios that control of the chief executive affords them,” according to Kaare Strøm, Wolfgang C. Müller, and Torbjörn Bergman, editors of the 2008 Cabinets and Coalition Bargaining: The Democratic Life Cycle in Western Europe. Between 1945 and 2003, nearly five-sixths of all cabinets in Europe’s parliamentary and semi-presidential systems constituted such multiparty governments, usually formed in cases where elections did not result in an overall parliamentary majority for a single party.

Coalition theories are a body of propositions designed to explain the dynamics of interparty cooperation in making, running, and breaking multiparty governments. Most theoretical literature on coalitions focuses on their partisan composition; the distribution of executive offices between the participating parties, or portfolio allocation; and variations in their duration. Some of this scholarship has been inductive and empirical, often influenced by normative concerns, such as government stability and performance in representative democracies. The more influential tradition has been a deductive and formal one, usually based on game theory, a rationalist theory derived from mathematics focusing on interactive decision making involving at least two actors.

Coalition Formation

The key concerns of game-theoretic models of coalition formation have traditionally been (1) the partisan composition of the coalition formed after negotiations between the parties, and (2) the allocation of portfolios. Game theorists have usually modeled political parties in coalition bargaining as unitary actors, either seeking to maximize the number of top executive offices they hold in government, or to get this government to adopt their preferred policies. Assuming politicians to be office seekers first and foremost, William I. Riker, in his 1962 work The Theory of Political Coalitions, predicted the number of parties likely to be included in the government: “In n-person, zero-sum games, where side payments are permitted, where players are rational, and they have perfect information, only minimal winning coalitions occur” (32). In other words, in any situation where three or more actors (n-persons) bargain over the formation over a coalition and where one actor’s gains (e.g., seats in the cabinet) are exactly balanced by the losses of the other “players,” only coalitions will form that control an overall majority of the parliamentary seats, but do not share the spoils of government office with more parties than necessary. The German coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats formed in 2005 under Chancellor Angela Merkel is a minimum-winning coalition: Had only one coalition party withdrawn its support, the government would have lost its parliamentary majority. Although Riker acknowledges that “oversized” coalitions may be formed as an “insurance policy” where the parties operate in an uncertain environment, the “minimal-winning criterion” has remained an influential concept.

Empirical and theoretical critiques of Riker’s perspective led to the addition of a policy dimension to many game theoretic models. In his 1970 book Conflict of Interest, Robert Axelrod predicted the formation of minimal-connected-winning coalitions, that is, minimal-winning coalitions formed of ideologically adjacent parties. The Italian government formed in 2008 by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for example, was composed of ideologically “connected” parties of the political right and center right. Later work based on spatial notions of “median” or (ideologically) “central” parties as well as “strong” or “very strong” parties (e.g., Michael Laver and Kenneth Shepsle’s 1996 Making and Breaking Governments: Cabinets and Legislatures in Parliamentary Democracies) demonstrated how sufficiently large parties could form and sustain even minority cabinets, if they occupied a pivotal position in the policy space. The social democratic Labor Parties of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden occupied such a pivotal position for most of the time since the 1930s. Such models reflected a shift of emphasis from office-seeking assumptions to models focusing on policy preferences as well as office motivations. While especially earlier models analyze patterns of interparty cooperation (e.g., coalitions) and competition in one ideological dimension—usually focusing on the ideological differences between the parties in economic policy—authors such as Norman Schofield made considerable progress in constructing models of coalition politics in two or more dimensions. Although the formation of stable coalitions becomes far more difficult if political competition includes more than one dimension, Schofield demonstrates in the 1995 article, “Coalition Politics,” that such a situation does not necessarily lead to theoretical predictions of legislative chaos. Coalitions (and even minority governments) can be stable under such conditions, if there is a core—a point representing acceptable compromise policies for all winning coalitions—in the multidimensional ideological space, which the largest or dominant party prefers. Other models sought to add institutional and electoral variables to game-theoretic explanations without losing rigor and generality. Strøm, in Minority Government and Majority Rule, for example, demonstrated that the toleration of minority cabinets may be an alternative to direct government participation, if rational parties are modeled as policy-seeking actors, the institutional environment allows minorities to influence policy making, and government participation involves likely electoral costs.

Portfolio Allocation

Like the literature on cabinet composition, early work on portfolio allocation was based on the assumption that political parties can be modeled as motivated by the pursuit of government office, neglecting the possibility of differential values of different portfolios to different parties and possible trade-offs between policy and office benefits. Empirical studies generally confirmed William A. Gamson’s 1961 law of proportionality: members of a coalition are predicted to receive cabinet portfolios in proportion to their contribution to the government’s parliamentary majority. Models such as Laver and Shepsle’s portfolio allocation model sought to overcome the limitations of purely quantitative, office-driven models. For them, parties are driven by policy as well as office motivations. Their model predicts that cabinets will form in equilibrium consisting of parties controlling the median legislator on the most important policy dimensions. These parties will be allocated the relevant portfolio(s), giving their ministers control of policy making in that particular area.

Coalition Duration

Beyond questions of government membership and portfolio allocation, coalition theories have focused on the decisions of political leaders to continue coalitions to the end of their “natural” term (usually the next election) or, alternatively, to terminate them earlier by changing the coalition’s partisan composition, or the person of the prime minister, or by bringing the election date forward, known as strategic parliamentary dissolutions. Early research largely followed the empirical tradition and attempted to identify the main sources of variations in coalition durability in the “structural attributes” of the coalitions themselves (e.g., number of parties or ideological disagreement between them), or in the coalitions’ bargaining environment (e.g., the size and polarization of the party system). In the 1980s, influential work challenged this structural perspective, arguing that the duration of coalitions was largely a function of critical events such as crises or scandals. Since the 1990s, a number of game-theoretic models have sought to incorporate such “random shocks” to coalition government and explain variations in the duration of coalitions by modeling the party leaders’ decisions to maintain or break coalitions as the result of strategic considerations, focusing on the utility of alternative opportunities of making or influencing policy, the opportunity cost of early terminations, the anticipated costs of early elections, and the anticipated transaction costs of alternative forms of government.

Coalition Governance

Finally, there has been a growing body of scholarship in coalition governance since the 1990s, seeking rigorously to model the dynamics of coalition politics after cabinet formation. In such endeavors, ministers are not conceived of as “policy dictators” (as in Laver and Shepsle’s model), nor do they have their hands entirely tied by coalition agreements between the parties in government. Their agenda powers may allow them some leeway to move the policy from the agreement initially reached in coalition bargaining towards their own preferred policy position. This potential for agency loss can be contained, depending on institutional constraints such as the prime minister’s powers, the extent of ministerial autonomy enshrined in the constitution, and commitment and enforcement mechanisms agreed between the parties in coalition treaties (for a survey, see Strøm, Müller, and Bergman’s Cabinets and Coalition Bargaining: The Democratic Life Cycle in Western Europe, chapters 5 and 8).

Despite its very considerable advances since the 1960s, coalition theory faces a number of challenges. Most importantly, there remains a significant gap between theoretical advances and empirical work, the latter often lagging behind the former in terms of measurement and appropriate statistical estimation techniques. Other challenges include a number of implausible and restrictive assumptions on which some models are still based, for example, the modeling of parties as unitary actors.

Bibliography:

Axelrod, Robert. Conflict of Interest. Chicago: Markham, 1970.
Diermeier, Daniel. “Coalition Government.” In The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy, edited by Barry R. Weingast and Donald A. Wittman, 162–179. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Gamson, William A. “A Theory of Coalition Formation.” American Sociological Review 26 (1961): 373–382.
Laver, Michael. “Government Termination.” Annual Review of Political Science 6 (2003): 23–40.
Laver, Michael, and Norman Schofield. Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Laver, Michael, and Kenneth Shepsle. Making and Breaking Governments: Cabinets and Legislatures in Parliamentary Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Riker, William I. The Theory of Political Coalitions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962.
Schofield, Norman. “Coalition Politics: A Formal Model and Empirical Analysis.” Journal of Theoretical Politics, 7 (1995): 245–281.
Strøm, Kaare. Minority Government and Majority Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Strøm, Kaare, Wolfgang C. Müller, and Torbjörn Bergman, eds. Cabinets and Coalition Bargaining:The Democratic Life Cycle in Western Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.