Government and Coalition Formation

A special issue of Games (ISSN 2073-4336).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2020) | Viewed by 3735

Special Issue Editor

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
Interests: applications on Comparative Politics and Voting; intersection of Economics and Political Science; the areas of Formal Theory and Experimental Methods

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In parliamentary democracies, political parties bargain over the allocation of cabinet portfolios when forming coalition governments. For this reason, most theoretical models of government formation focus on the assumption that agents (the legislative parties) are primarily office-seeking. However, as early suggested by Axelrod (1970), office-motivated politicians are interested not only in maximizing their office benefits but also in minimizing the “transaction costs” of the bargaining process over the government coalition policy. Two major research areas of government formation have emerged from this consideration. On the one hand, what coalition of parliamentary parties is more likely to form and what are the features, as size, ideological congruence, or previous government experience, that determine whether a coalition is more likely to emerge? One the other hand, what features make a government coalition more likely to survive and be stable?

Contributions that address either research area are welcome. Relevant topics include (but are not limited to):

  • The qualitative aspect of portfolio allocation. What ministries are prioritized by coalition parties and why?
  • The indivisible feature of cabinet portfolio. How do parties bargain over indivisible and heterogeneous cabinet portfolios?
  • The effect of uncertainty of future electoral prospects on the government coalition stability.

Dr. Anna Bassi
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • government formation
  • cabinet portfolio
  • bargaining
  • government stability

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

29 pages, 767 KiB  
Article
Parties’ Preferences for Office and Policy Goals
by Anna Bassi
Games 2021, 12(1), 6; https://doi.org/10.3390/g12010006 - 14 Jan 2021
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2967
Abstract
Although parties’ preferences for office and policy goals have been featured by many rational choice models of party behavior and a majority of coalition theories, the literature still lacks a measure and a comprehensive analysis of how parties’ preferences vary among parties and [...] Read more.
Although parties’ preferences for office and policy goals have been featured by many rational choice models of party behavior and a majority of coalition theories, the literature still lacks a measure and a comprehensive analysis of how parties’ preferences vary among parties and across countries. This study aims to fill this gap by presenting the results of an original expert survey protocol, which finds that parties pursue both goals simultaneously as office is sought both as and an end and as a means to affect policy, and that the degree to which they prefer policy versus office objectives varies across parties and countries. I provide an application of the preference ratings for policy versus office in the context of government formation, by using the ratings to solve for and predict the equilibrium coalition that should have formed in Spain after the 2015 elections. The government predicted by the model matches the government that formed, providing evidence of the ability of the preference ratings to generate reliable predictions of the composition of government coalitions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Government and Coalition Formation)
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