The distribution of individual cabinet positions in coalition governments: A sequential approach

Multiparty government in parliamentary democracies entails bargaining over the payoffs of government participation, in particular the allocation of cabinet positions. While most of the literature deals with the numerical distribution of cabinet seats among government parties, this article explores the distribution of individual portfolios. It argues that coalition negotiations are sequential choice processes that begin with the allocation of those portfolios most important to the bargaining parties. This induces conditionality in the bargaining process as choices of individual cabinet positions are not independent of each other. Linking this sequential logic with party preferences for individual cabinet positions, the authors of the article study the allocation of individual portfolios for 146 coalition governments in Western and Central Eastern Europe. The results suggest that a sequential logic in the bargaining process results in better predictions than assuming mutual independence in the distribution of individual portfolios.     

A Model of Endogenous Government Formation

Political parties bargain over the allocation of cabinet portfolios when forming coalition governments. Noncooperative theories of legislative bargaining typically predict that the “formateur” enjoys a disproportionate share of government ministry positions. However, empirical evidence indicates that parties receive shares of portfolios proportional to their share of legislative seats that a government party contributes to the government coalition in support of Gamson's Law of portfolio allocation. This article examines government formation as a process in which both the government coalition and the formateur are determined endogenously. In equilibrium, if parties have similar preferences over cabinet portfolios, the share of seats they are allocated is proportional to the parties’ sizes.     

The portfolio allocation paradox: An investigation into the nature of a very strong but puzzling relationship

Abstract.  Perhaps the strongest empirical finding in political science is 'Gamson's Law': the near-perfect relationship that exists in parliamentary systems between a coalition party's seat contribution to the government and its quantitative allocation of cabinet portfolios. Nevertheless, doubts remain. What would happen if the salience or importance of the various portfolios was also taken into account? Should it not be the case that payoffs correspond with bargaining power rather than seat contributions? And perhaps most significantly, would addressing these issues produce evidence that the parties designated to form governments extract disproportionately large payoffs for themselves, as predicted by 'proposer' models of bargaining? Utilizing the results of a new expert survey of portfolio salience in 14 Western European countries, the authors of this article explore each of these questions. Their basic finding is that salience-weighted portfolios payoffs overwhelmingly mirror seat contributions, contra proposer models and any other models based on bargaining power. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for formal models of bargaining.     

Bargaining in legislatures,portfolio allocation,and the electoral costs of governing

What motivates political parties in the legislative arena? Existing legislative bargaining models stress parties’ office and policy motivations. A particularly important question concerns how parties in coalition government agree the distribution of cabinet seats. This article adds to the portfolio allocation literature by suggesting that future electoral considerations affect bargaining over the allocation of cabinet seats in multi-party cabinets. Some parties are penalised by voters for participating in government, increasing the attractiveness of staying in opposition. This ‘cost of governing’ shifts their seat reservation price – the minimum cabinet seats demanded in return for joining the coalition. Results of a randomised survey experiment of Irish legislators support our expectation, demonstrating that political elites are sensitive to future electoral losses when contemplating the distribution of cabinet seats. This research advances our understanding of how parties’ behaviour between elections is influenced by anticipation of voters’ reactions.     

Uncertainty,Complexity, and Gamson’s Law: Comparing Coalition Formation in Western Europe

According to Gamson’s Law, the allocation of cabinet portfolios in parliamentary democracies is proportional to the legislative seat shares of the governing parties. However, portfolio allocation departs systematically from perfect proportionality. This paper proposes a theory of portfolio allocation that seeks to explain the variance in proportionality across different bargaining situations. It argues that the degree to which the coalition formation process is characterised by uncertainty and complexity influences portfolio allocation. In uncertain and complex bargaining situations, parties that otherwise would be in an advantageous bargaining position will have a difficult time exploiting their bargaining advantage. As a result, portfolio allocation in such circumstances will be closer to proportionality. These patterns are observed in data on coalition formation in 14 West European parliamentary systems in the period 1945–1999.     

When Second‐Best is Still a No‐Brainer: Why Labour Should Shoot for a Majority Coalition in May 2015

The chances of Labour winning the 2015 general election with a comfortable overall majority are vanishingly small. It could, however, emerge as the largest party or finish just a handful of seats behind the Conservatives. Either scenario would give it at least a chance—and a bigger chance than many realise, we argue—of forming a government. In that event, Labour may be faced with a choice between getting together with another party (or parties) to form a majority coalition or else forming a minority government (either on its own or with one or more partners), which could assemble different majorities for different pieces of legislation or try to negotiate a ‘confidence and supply’ agreement. Given the precedents from the UK and overseas, we argue that, faced with this dilemma, Labour should do all it can to form a majority coalition. We also argue that Labour can learn some useful lessons from the Cameron–Clegg coalition.     

‘Get Brexit Done’: The New Political Divides of England and Wales at the 2019 Election

This article analyses the successful Conservative election campaign of 2019 and how it took advantage of a fractured political and economic landscape. It reviews the unique circumstances around the 2019 election and the ‘surprising death’ of a no-deal Brexit. We then analyse the divergent political communication strategies in the 2017 and 2019 Conservative campaigns showing how the latter was much more coherent and politically unorthodox. Drawing on socioeconomic, demographic and British Election Study data, we argue that Boris Johnson’s messaging was carefully tailored towards the demands of voters in the ‘red wall’ seats. Conservative success was built around an appeal to voters in these economically depressed ‘geographies of discontent’. But while tremendously successful, the coalition this created is potentially fragile. An unconventional, ‘leftish’ Conservative campaign built a new, diverse bloc of voters. It includes a number of left-wingers expecting change alongside traditional Conservative supporters, and will be hard to keep together given the economic turbulence ahead.     

Who gets what in coalition governments? Predictors of portfolio allocation in parliamentary democracies

Ministerial portfolios are the most obvious payoffs for parties entering a governing coalition in parliamentary democracies. This renders the bargaining over portfolios an important phase of the government formation process. The question of ‘who gets what, and why?’ in terms of ministerial remits has not yet received much attention by coalition or party scholars. This article focuses on this qualitative aspect of portfolio allocation and uses a new comparative dataset to evaluate a number of hypotheses that can be drawn from the literature. The main hypothesis is that parties which, in their election manifestos, emphasise themes corresponding to the policy remit of specific cabinet portfolios are more likely to obtain control over these portfolios. The results show that policy saliency is indeed an important predictor of portfolio allocation in postwar Western European parliamentary democracies.     

Institutions and coalition formation: The German election of 2005

The German election of 2005 creates three puzzles for the literature on coalition formation. First, the election led to a rare event in German politics and in parliamentary systems more generally, a ‘grand coalition’ between the two largest parties. Second, a minority government, something which has never occurred in postwar Germany (except briefly as the result of the breakdown of a government coalition), was in fact one of the two most likely governments to form. Third, the parties of the left retained a comfortable majority in the Bundestag; however they did not form a coalition. The election of 2005 appears unique in German politics, but we argue that its outcome is easily understood using existing institutional theories of coalition formation. We examine party positions in two dimensions (economic and social) using computer-based word scoring of party manifestos. We demonstrate that the conditions for a SPD minority government were present in Germany due to its central location in the policy space. While the configuration of policy positions would thus have allowed the SPD to form a minority government, the role of the Federal President as a veto player could have prevented it from forming, and the presence of an opposition-controlled upper house would have decreased its effectiveness. The mere possibility of forming a minority government gave the SPD a bargaining advantage in the coalition negotiations with the CDU/CSU. We show that in the final portfolio allocation, the SPD received ministries which control approximately two-thirds of the federal budget.     

Fairness and qualitative portfolio allocation in multiparty governments

How do political parties divide coalition payoffs in multiparty governments? Perhaps the most striking answer to this question is Gamson’s Law, which suggests a strong fairness norm in the allocation of office payoffs among coalition partners. Building upon recent advancements in portfolio allocation research, we extend this approach in three important ways. First, we study fairness with regard to the allocation of policy (rather than office) payoffs. Second, we introduce measures to assess the fairness of the division of policy payoffs following two norms: envy-freeness and equitability. Third, we explore why some allocations of ministerial portfolios deviate from fairness norms. Based on an original data set of party preferences for individual portfolios in Western and Central Eastern Europe, we find substantial variation in the fairness of policy payoffs across cabinets. Moreover, coalitions are more likely to arrive at envy-free and equitable bargaining outcomes if (1) these fair allocations are based on an allocation of cabinet positions that is proportional to party size and if (2) the bargaining power is distributed evenly among government parties. The results suggest that fairness is not a universal norm for portfolio allocation in multiparty governments, but in fact depends on the cabinet parties’ bargaining positions.

     

Portfolio Allocation as Leadership Strategy: Intraparty Bargaining in Japan

How do the dynamics of portfolio allocation work within parties? While much of the existing literature focuses on portfolio allocation among parties in coalition governments, bargaining over cabinet portfolios also takes place within parties because many parties have internal divisions or factions that influence these decisions. By analyzing data on portfolio allocation in the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan from 1960 through 2007, this study demonstrates that, contrary to the proportionality proposition (Gamson's Law), substantial variance exists in allocation outcomes over time because party leaders allocate cabinet portfolios among factions as a means of preventing defections and challenges from their party's members. The resulting portfolio allocation reflects the bargaining dynamics within the party: I find that party leaders surrender more portfolios as they become more vulnerable to challenges posed by internal rivals.     

Multiparty electoral competition in the Netherlands and Germany: A model based on multinomial probit

A typical assumption of electoral models of party competition is that parties adopt policy positions so as to maximize expected vote share. Here we use Euro-barometer survey data and European elite-study data from 1979 for the Netherlands and Germany to construct a stochastic model of voter response, based on multinomial probit estimation. For each of these countries, we estimate a pure spatial electoral voting model and a joint spatial model. The latter model also includes individual voter and demographic characteristics. The pure spatial models for the two countries quite accurately described the electoral response as a stochastic function of party positions. We use these models to perform a thought experiment so as to estimate the expected vote maximizing party positions. We go on to propose a model of internal party decision-making based both on pre-election electoral estimation and post-election coalition bargaining. This model suggests why the various parties in the period in question did not adopt vote maximizing positions. We argue that maximizing expected vote will not, in general, be a rational party strategy in multiparty political systems which are based on proportional representation.     

Voting Weights and Formateur Advantages in the Formation of Coalition Governments

Over the last two decades a large and important literature has emerged that uses game theoretic models of bargaining to study legislative coalitions. To test key predictions of these models, we examine the composition of coalition governments from 1946 and 2001. These predictions are almost always expressed in terms of parties' minimal-integer voting weights. We calculate such weights for all parliamentary parties. In addition, we develop a statistical model that nests the predictions of many of these models of the distribution of posts. We find that for parties that join (but did not form) the government, there is a linear relationship between their share of the voting weight in parliament and their share of cabinet posts. The party that forms the government (the formateur) receives a substantial "bonus" relative to its voting weight. The latter finding is more consistent with proposal-based bargaining models of coalition formation and suggests that parties gain disproportionate power not because of their size but because of their proposal power.     

Portfolio Allocation and Policy Compromises: How and Why the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats Formed a Coalition Government

The question of ‘who gets what?’ is one of the most interesting issues in coalition politics. Research on portfolio allocation has thus far produced some clear‐cut empirical findings: coalition parties receive ministerial posts in close proportion to the number of parliamentary seats they win. This article poses two simple questions: Why did the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats agree to form a coalition government and, secondly, did the process of portfolio allocation in the United Kingdom in 2010 reflect standard patterns of cabinet composition in modern democracies? In order to answer these questions, a content analysis of election manifestos is applied in this article in order to estimate the policy positions of the parties represented in the House of Commons. The results show that a coalition between the Tories and Lib Dems was indeed the optimal solution in the British coalition game in 2010. When applying the portfolio allocation model, it turns out that the Conservatives fulfilled the criteria of a ‘strong party’, implying that the Tories occupied the key position in the coalition game. On account of this pivotal role, they were ultimately able to capture the most important ministries in the new coalition government.     

Determinants of cabinet size

A large literature examines the composition of cabinets in parliamentary systems, but very little attention has been paid to the size of those cabinets. Yet not only is the size of the cabinet related to the division of portfolios that may take place, cabinet size is also related to policy outcomes. In this article, a theory of party size is considered which examines how coalition bargaining considerations, intra‐party politics and efficiency concerns affect the size of cabinets. Hypotheses derived from the theory are examined using an extensive cross‐national dataset on coalition governments which allows us to track changes in cabinet size and membership both across and within cabinets.     

Do party supporters accept policy compromises in coalition governments?

Government formation in multi-party systems often requires coalition negotiations and finding common ground among coalition partners. Supporters of parties involved in the government formation process face a trade-off when evaluating such bargaining processes: on the one hand, voters usually prefer seeing their party being in government rather than in opposition; on the other hand, negotiations require coalition compromises that they might dislike. In this paper, we study voters’ willingness to accept policy compromises during government formation processes. We argue that voters’ acceptance of policy compromises depends on both the strength of their party attachment and the importance they assign to the issue at stake during the coalition negotiations. Not giving in on important issues is key, especially for supporters of challenger parties, who hold strong policy preferences on a selected number of issues. To test these expectations, we collected original survey data immediately after the Spanish general election in November 2019. The results show support for the hypothesized effects, shed light on the pressure potential coalition partners face during government formation and help explain the failures of government formation attempts in increasingly polarized societies.     

The 2016 Scottish Parliament election: a nationalist minority,a Conservative comeback and a Labour collapse

This article examines the political context, campaign, election results and outcomes of the 2016 Scottish Parliament election. The Scottish National Party (SNP) secured its third electoral victory, yet failed to achieve a widely predicted majority. With just two MSPs short of a majority, the SNP has ruled out any formal coalition with the opposition and will instead govern as a minority administration. The composition of the parliament’s opposition also changed significantly. The Scottish Conservatives increased their share of the constituency and regional votes, and became, for the first time, the largest opposition party in the chamber. Scottish Labour suffered a severe electoral drubbing, losing 13 of its seats. The election was also important for the Scottish Liberal Democrats and Scottish Green Party. The latter increased its vote share and number of seats, leapfrogging the Lib Dems to become the fourth largest party in the chamber.     

Gamson's Law and voters’ perceptions of portfolio allocation

The assignment of ministerial portfolios to parties is one of the most contested and consequential processes in coalition politics. Accordingly, a great deal of scholarship has investigated how many portfolios different parties obtain in coalition negotiations as well as which parties are assigned which portfolios. However, to our knowledge, no one has ever examined how voters perceive the outcomes of this process – perceptions which must be fundamental to any assessment of policy responsibility in systems with coalition government. This article uses original survey data from four Western European countries to examine voter perceptions of the distribution of cabinet portfolios across parties. In addition to describing the extent to which voters know this distribution, the article also examines whether their perceptions are consistent with a number of different heuristics that voters might use to infer characteristics of the cabinet portfolio distribution. The results suggest that many voters use party role and size heuristics to infer the number of portfolios allocated to different parties as well as an ‘importance rule’, a ‘topical affinity rule’ and a ‘historical regularity rule’ to infer which parties hold which portfolios, but also that a significant number of voters have direct knowledge (not inferred using heuristics) of which parties hold which ministries.     

The Effects of Structures and Power on State Bargaining Strategies

When and why will states adopt more (or less) cooperative bargaining strategies? Standard answers to this question focus on the role of state power. Other scholars highlight socialization effects. I argue that in most international negotiations, the institutional bargaining structure will mitigate the effects of power and socialization, and drive state bargaining behavior. Factors highlighted by formal models of international bargaining should therefore best explain the variation in the strategies states adopt. I introduce empirical measures of these abstract concepts, and test their effects against those of power and socialization using an original dataset of state bargaining strategies in the European Union (EU). The results show that structural factors best explain variation in the EU states’ bargaining strategies. I conclude by highlighting the conditions under which these effects should explain state bargaining behavior in other international negotiations, and discuss the implications of this argument for the study of international bargaining.     

Issue saliency,policy distances and coalition bargaining

This article addresses the problem of policy as a constraint for coalition bargaining. Two questions are posed: How fruitful are uni‐dimensional models for the analysis of coalition bargaining in multiparty systems? And how much do we gain by using a multidimensional approach? The questions are examined empirically by applying various sets of ten‐point issue scales. The Norwegian system is used as a case. The analysis indicates that a uni‐dimensional approach contributes notably to the understanding of coalition bargaining in the system. However, as the parties are divided along several traditional cleavages, considerable sophistication can be gained by adding more dimensions to the model.