Breaking into Government: Coalition Formation and Destruction in the New Europe in Comparative Perspective

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Due to the preponderance of coalition governments across Eastern Europe, understanding of why certain coalitions form and others do not is vital as it has consequences for other areas of the political process such as voting behaviour, party system interaction, parliamentary behaviour and party discipline and government durability. Based primarily on research completed in my PhD thesis, I will conduct a cross-national quantitative analysis of government formation and dissolution events over the entire democratic period of Eastern Europe since the fall of Communism in 1990. The proposed research programme offers an almost unique opportunity to analyse government formation and dissolution in the context of democratizing parliamentary states to answer three primary questions:1) What can we learn from established models? Does party size trump all other considerations or is ideology an influential factor? I found that contrary to expectations based on analyses of coalition formation in other parliamentary democracies (Franklin and Mackie, 1984) and some of the classic theories of government formation as expressed by authors such as Dodd (1976) and De Swaan (1973), the ideological diversity of parliament did not have a significant influence on the majority status of governments in East Central Europe. The implications of this could be enormous. Can political parties in Eastern Europe survive long-term if they behave in such an office-seeking manner without establishing an ideological basis for support? I also analysed government formation using Laver and Shepsle's 'Portfolio Allocation'(PA) model which suggests that party positions on key policy dimensions, irrespective of overall ideological profile, together with relative party size determines the composition of the government. This model has rarely been tested empirically due to the extensive data requirements so in that respect, this is an important contribution to the literature on established models. 2) Why do some governments dissolve before their tenure is complete? I used a survival analysis technique called Cox regression to analyse the factors that defined governments that terminated early and found that the number of parties in opposition and the ideological diversity of the government play key roles in determining the lifespan of a government.3) Do institutions matter in government formation? One of the most original elements of my research is an analysis of an overlooked aspect of government formation: the party system. The party system structures the manner in which political parties interact with each other and its influence over the party-composition of coalition governments could therefore be considerable. Through this analysis, I uncovered significant evidence that the relatively high levels of party system instability that are evident in the region has not prevented the development of stable competition for government from different ideological 'blocs' - though the identity of the parties that represent those blocs had changed somewhat over the years.The postdoctoral fellowship will allow me to pursue some of the issues that grew from my PhD and require further exploration. In particular, I have the opportunity to add further cases to my dataset on coalition governments which will strengthen the statistical analysis in the thesis. I would also seek to update my dataset on party policy positions in Eastern Europe which is, to my knowledge, the only source of quantitative data on this subject that covers the entire period since the transition to democracy in 1990. As such, I consider it a valuable resource both for my own work and that of other academics.