Distant friends and nearby enemies: The politics of legislative coalition formation

It is usually thought that a coalition leader in a legislature will construct coalitions of legislators who are ‘close’ to each other in the policy space. However, if there is some ‘status quo’ or other reversion point that will hold if the coalition leader fails to construct a winning coalition, a counter-intuitive result about the nature of these coalitions emerges: the coalition leader may be forced to construct a coalition which includes legislators who are ‘distant’ from him and which excludes legislators who are ‘close’ to him.