Coalition bargaining duration in multiparty democracies

Author(s)
Alejandro Ecker, Thomas Meyer
Abstract

Why do some government formation periods end after a few days, while others last for several weeks or even months? Despite the rich literature on government formation, surprisingly little is known about the underlying bargaining processes. This article introduces a new dataset on 303 bargaining attempts in nineteen European democracies to analyse the duration of individual bargaining rounds. The study hypothesizes that (1) preference tangentiality, (2) ideological proximity, (3) incumbency and (4) party leadership tenure decrease the duration of coalition bargaining. Employing a copula approach to account for the non-random selection process of the observations, it shows that these actor-specific factors matter in addition to systemic context factors such as post-election bargaining and party system complexity. These findings highlight the need to consider both actor-specific and systemic factors of the bargaining context to explain government formation.

Organisation(s)
Department of Government
External organisation(s)
Universität Mannheim
Journal
British Journal of Political Science
Volume
50
Pages
261-280
No. of pages
20
ISSN
0007-1234
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123417000539
Publication date
12-2017
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
506014 Comparative politics
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Sociology and Political Science
Portal url
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/coalition-bargaining-duration-in-multiparty-democracies(c7b88033-3961-49c6-af31-22d3c772d2a6).html