‘Coalition formation in Europe is in theory predictable’. Discuss
Why predictable?
Possible coalitions in Europe?
History analysis
Countries:
1. Germany
2. Sweden, Denmark, Norway
3. Netherlands
4. Belgium
5. Italy
6. Ireland
Although coalition governments are uncommon for Anglo-Saxon countries, in Western Europe coalitions are the only way to understand European political systems.
The processes of government formation and dissolution, the role of the head of state and the working of the cabinet are all likely to be affected by coalitions. The strategies of political parties are likely to be affected by the knowledge that they will be unlikely to win power on their own but will have to share power with like-minded allies. (Bogdanor, 1983)
The link between party and coalition policy and discuss ways in which the analysis of party manifestos and government declarations might throw light on the issues that have been raised.
Some scholars provide review of coalition theory as it applies to all aspects of government formation and maintenance, but some concentrate only upon those aspects that have a direct bearing upon the interaction of party and coalition policy. Early theories were concerned almost exclusively with the rewards going to those politicians who got into office, rewards such as power, prestige and so on. More recent theories have been based upon the assumption that politicians are motivated in their coalition bargaining solely by a desire to affect public policy outputs.(Laver & Budge, 1992)
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POLICY BLIND THEORIES OF coalition government – Office-seeking motivations(case study?)
Riker’s theory of political coalitions – the rewards of office, fixed prize to be divided by the winners of the coalition game. For this reason Riker’s famous ‘minimal winning’ proposition suggests that coalitions will compromise no more than the minimum number of actors necessary to achieve office.
Generally speaking, the office-orientated approach argues thatcoalitions will form which control a small (von Neumann and Morgenstern1944, pp. 429– 430) or the smallest (Riker 1962) winning majority inside the respective parliament. A third important office-orientated and policy-blind approach is the bargaining proposition, developed by Leiserson (1966, 1968).
He assumed that not the strength of each political party, measured by its seat share in the parliament, but rather the absolute number of parties involved in the coalition formation game is decisive. Coalitions should therefore form that satisfy two conditions: First, the coalition must have a majority and, second, it should include as few parties as possible. Transaction costs should thereby be reduced to a minimum.
Theories that are based on non-cooperative game theory also highlight the strength of parties in the parliament.
Austen-Smith and Banks (1988) stress that the strongest parliamentary party has the best chance of becoming the ‘formateur’. In most cases, the ‘formateur party’ becomes a member of the next government and, furthermore, has a strong bargaining position in the coalition negotiations (see also Baron and Ferejohn 1989; Baron and Diermeier 2001).
POLICY-BASED THEORIES OF COALITION GOVERNMENT – Policy-seeking model (case study)
If, however, coalition formation is also about ideology, then political parties with similar ideological backgrounds should be more likely to form a coalition government, regardless of the size of this alliance. Axelrod (1970) called this the theory of minimal connected winning coalitions. Such coalitions are characterized by two features: first, the coalition has a majority inside the parliament and, secondly, they are neighbors on a common left-right continuum. De Swaan (1973) assumption was that instead of a simple left-right ordering, it is the ideological distance between the parties that is decisive for the outcome of the coalition game. From De Swaan’s perspective, political actors ‘calculate’ the distance between themselves and the other parties, so that coalition governments should be formed which minimize that distance (see also Grofman 1982; Laver and Shepsle 1990, 1996; Schofield 1995; Warwick 2006).
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In order to have a stable government it is important to have consensus. Consensus is a general understanding and agreement on fundamental principles. In politics there are three main types of consensus, Societal Consensus, Political Consensus and consensus in policy making. Societal consensus is overall public opinion, the political beliefs of the public. Normally most peoples political opinions ...
Sened (1995, 1996) combined office- and policy-constraints in his model, so that information on the parties’ different payoff preferences is taken into account.
In a study that analyses government formation in a comparative and multivariate design, Martin and Stevenson (2001) show that office- and policy-related factors are not the only things that matter in coalition formation. They find evidence that government formation is also influenced by institutional and ‘semi-institutional’ factors. Such factors could be, for instance, the requirement of votes of confidence as well as rejections of feasible coalitions. Standard spatial models do not include such institutional or behavioralist constraints (see, e.g., Strّm 1990; Strّm et al. 1994; Adams et al. 2005, pp. 19–27).
Coalitions are assumed to be motivated by policy . Policy –seeking models of coalitional behaviour comprised sets of proposed additions to minimal winning theory, but were not models that were driven, from the bottom up, by policy-seeking motivation. Typically they considered only coalitions that are minimal winning, and predicted that those with the smallest ideological distance between parties would be preferred.
De Swaan(1973) offers statement of the essential trust of theories which combine statements about party policy with a minimal winning criterion based on an assumed office-seeking motivation. “an actor strives to bring about a winning coalition in which he is included and which he expects to adopt a policy that is as close as possible… to his own most preferred policy”
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One political phenomenon that has raised debates in the political community has been the number of parties that occur in a given country's party system. With political parties being the connection between the issues of the people and the policy that is enacted, the importance of proper representation of these parties to the people is fundamental to the democracy of the nation. For this reason, it ...
Policy-based theories of coalition government have moved considerably beyond this approach, however, and sophisticated models of coalition bargaining over policy have been developed within a game-theoretic tradition that has become a major academic industry. Scholars have come to the conclusion that when only one policy dimension is important, the party controlling the median legislator on that dimension is effectively a policy dictator. Parties to the left of it will be unwilling to tolerate a policy move in a rightwards direction. Parties to the right of it will be unwilling to tolerate a move leftwards.
MINORITY GOVERNMENT, VIABLE GOVERNMENT AND PARTY POLICY
-votes of confidence (to be won by majority governments, defined as executives whose member parties between them control a legislative majority)
Example: 4 party minority situation and possible coalitions
PartySeats | A
20 | B
20 | C
40 | D
20 |
Coalitions | | | | |
1 | * | | * | |
2 | | * | * | |
3 | | | * | * |
4 | * | * | | * |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
Every coalition must include party C, the only way that party C can be excluded is with coalition ABD which will mean more ideologically diverse coalition.
CONSTRAINTS AND INFLUENCES ON COALITION BARGAINING
The real world of politics is a world of constraints. Many factors – related to institutions and constitutions, to international politics and to many other things besides – can constrain or influence the decisions of politicians about participating in a coalition, quite apart from policy preferences or the desire to get into office!!!
Here we begin the process of specifying constraints and influences on bargaining, by discussing some of the more obvious factors that appear to operate in a range of political systems.
The clearest example can be found in the effective prohibition of Communist participation in government in the period after early 1948 – the time of the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia.
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Communist parties were treated as outsiders, a situation that resulted from fears on the part of others about whether the Communist would abide by the results of electoral procedures if they moved into positions of power.(having in mind that Europe was highly dependent on USA’s aids and trade) No matter how much agreement existed between Communists and other parties on immediate policy, they were ruled out of coalition-making from the start by what amounted to a set of firm side-constraints upon the range of possible coalitions. Coalitions containing the Communists were not in the list of feasible possibilities.
A similar process seems to have been at work in relation to neo-Nazi or neo-Fascist parties such as the Italian MS. The official policy positions of such parties are often no more right wing than ideological near neighbours, but the emotive associations of Fascism or Nazism have effectively turned these parties into outsiders as far as participation in government is concerned.
It is clear that electoral systems can have a major impact on coalition bargaining. Certain electoral systems, for example, create strong incentives for politicians to form pre-electoral coalitions. This is particularly important when the electoral law distorts representation in the legislature in favour of large parties.
A good example of pre-electoral coalitions can be found in Ireland in 1973. Fine Gael and Labour agreed a fourteen-point electoral programme and contested the election as a prospective coalition government. Each encouraged its supporters to give lower preference votes to the other. The two parties gained seats in the election and controlled a legislative majority between them. Without any further real negotiation, they formed a coalition government that lasted four years.
West European constitutions require an incoming government to investiture vote; many others don’t. An investiture requirement forces an incoming government to survive on the basis of its programme and cabinet taken as a whole, and thus provides a much sterner test, making it more difficult for minority governments to form. In the absence of an investiture requirement, minority governments are more likely to be viable, since the entire government package does not need the agreement of a majority of the legislature.
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Another feature of government formation concerns the role played by the head of state. In some states, West Germany for example, the President is nothing more than a figurehead who has no real role in the appointment, let alone the selection, of the government. In other countries, such as the Netherlands, the head of state plays much more active role. Typically, this role involves the identification of a particular senior politician as formateur – government former – a situation which gives the designated politician a key role in the bargaining process. A process that allows a specific coalition nucleus to be designated by the head of state produces quite a different bargaining environment to the freestyle bargaining between elites that obtains when the head of state remains aloof.
Theories normally describe pairs of parties being “closer” or “further apart” from each other in policy terms, making use of the key concept of “policy distance” between actors. Policy distances can only be measured in terms of some basic set of reference points, defined in terms of a particular set of dimensions of policy.
Grofman(1982) assumes that coalitions are built in a series of stages in which parties first combine into protocoalitions, and that protocoalitions then combine into larger coalitions untile some threshold is reached which makes the coalition large enough to take office. He also suggests that each stage of the formation process is driven by the desire of the actors to form coalitions with the minimum ideological diversity.
At stage 1 each actor looks to form a protocoalition of himself and the actor nearest to him in N-space. If no winning coalition is formed, then the process moves on to Stage 2, in which each protocoalition seeks to merge with exactly one other protocoalition and the process continues until a winning coalition is formed.
If we see coalitions as “clusters” of parties, then clusters analysis takes a set of points and combines the two closest points into a cluster. The process continues until there is a single cluster of all points (a grand coalition)
HIERARCHICAL OR NON-HIERARCHICAL CLUSTERING STRATEGIES
Hierarchical strategies assume that, at each stage in the process of clustering(coalition formation), the two closest points(parties) are combined into a new cluster(protocoalition), a process that is iterated until all points lie within a single cluster(grand coalition).
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If we accept the hierarchical clustering assumption, with its implication that protocoaltions cannot break up once they have formed, then we can represent the process of coalition formation by a tree diagram, or dendrogram.
-give example with parties
A B C D E
15 15 15 15 15
First coalition DE , (not enough seats), then A+B eventually joins C and then if ABC don’t have enough sets – grand coalition.
Non hierarchical, clustering
A B C D E
15 15 15 15 15
————————————————-
x x x x x
x x x x x
x x x x x
x x x x x
x x x x x
Bogdanor, V (1983) Coalition Government in Western Europe, 1st ed London: Heinemann Educational Books
Coalition far from designating the name of a single category government covers a variety, or rather a spectrum, of different types. For coalition implies co-operation between political parties, and this co-operation can take place at one of three different levels – governmental, parliamentary and electoral.
Parliamentary coalitions occur when framework and its electoral single party enjoys an overall majority, the party asked to form a government prefers to rule as a minority government relying upon an arrangement with another party or parties to secure its survival(similar with the Lib-Lab pact in Britain in 1977-78) or alternatively , a government may seek support from different parties for different items of legislation – a method much used in Denmark where it is known as government by “jumping majorities”.
A minority government might survive without outside support on a basis of toleration by the opposition parties which for tactical reasons are unwilling to defeat it.
In Belgium, the Netherlands and West Germany, majority coalition rather than minority government is the invariable rule. But in Denmark, and, to a lesser extent in other Scandinavian countries, minority government can sometimes be the outcome of the process of government formation.
Although some minority governments in Italy have survived with external support, in general both Scandinavia and Italy majority coalition is almost always the preferred alternative to minority government.
In Britain, by contrast on those occasions, on those occasions in the twentieth century when one party has failed to gain an overall majority – the two general elections of 1910, the elections of 1923, 1929 and February 1974 – the result has always been minority government. In Ireland, coalition has been the instrument by which the parties opposed to Fianna Fail have sought to constitute an alternative government. Fianna Fail as the dominant party has refused to consider coalition; and when it has lacked an overall majority, it has ruled as a single party minority government.
Where minority governments are formed, their survival can be aided by constitutional rules. Denmark is the country whose constitution affords the greatest encouragement to minority government, since there is no requirement for a new administration to secure a vote of confidence as its investiture. Instead the government survives until a positive decision is made by the other parties in the Folkeiting to defeat it: in other words, the government survives unless there is a majority against it.
In Sweden, the constitution provides that a Prime Minister, nominated by the Speaker, is confirmed in the office unless there is an absolute majority of the Riksdag against him. The vote in Sweden to confirm the Prime Minister, although it makes minority government possible, affects the operation of minority government in a manner subtly different than Denmark.
The West German electoral system with its provision for two votes – one for a constituency candidate, the other for a party list – allows a coalition government to appeal explicitly for endorsement as a coalition.
Coalition Government in Western Germany
-need for stability (coalition was viewed as a stabilising element)
