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

由于联合政府在东欧占主导地位，理解为什么某些联盟形成而其他联盟不形成是至关重要的，因为它对政治过程的其他领域产生影响，如投票行为、政党制度互动、议会行为、政党纪律和政府的持久性。我将主要基于博士论文中完成的研究，对1990年共产主义垮台以来整个东欧民主时期的政府组建和解散事件进行跨国定量分析。拟议的研究计划提供了一个几乎独一无二的机会来分析议会制国家民主化背景下的政府组建和解散，以回答三个主要问题：1)我们可以从已建立的模型中学到什么？政党规模是否胜过所有其他考虑因素，还是意识形态是一个有影响的因素？我发现，与基于对其他议会民主国家联盟形成的分析（Franklin and Mackie, 1984）以及多德（Dodd, 1976）和德斯旺（De Swaan, 1973）等作者所表达的一些政府形成的经典理论的预期相反，议会的意识形态多样性并没有对东中欧政府的多数地位产生重大影响。这种情况的影响可能是巨大的。如果东欧的政党在没有建立支持的意识形态基础的情况下以这种寻求职位的方式行事，它们能长期生存下去吗？我还使用Laver和Shepsle的“投资组合配置”（PA）模型分析了政府的组成，该模型表明，政党在关键政策维度上的立场，无论整体意识形态如何，以及相对的政党规模，都决定了政府的组成。由于广泛的数据需求，该模型很少得到实证检验，因此在这方面，这是对已建立模型的文献的重要贡献。2)为什么有些政府任期还没结束就解散了？我使用了一种被称为Cox回归的生存分析技术，分析了决定政府提前结束的因素，发现反对党的数量和政府的意识形态多样性在决定政府寿命方面发挥了关键作用。3)制度在政府形成中起作用吗？我的研究中最具原创性的元素之一是对政府形成中被忽视的一个方面的分析：政党制度。政党制度构成了政党之间相互作用的方式，因此它对联合政府的政党组成的影响可能是相当大的。通过这一分析，我发现了重要的证据，表明该地区政党制度的相对高度不稳定并没有阻止不同意识形态“集团”对政府的稳定竞争的发展，尽管代表这些集团的政党的身份多年来有所改变。博士后奖学金将使我能够继续研究博士期间产生的一些问题，这些问题需要进一步的探索。特别是，我有机会在我的联合政府数据集中增加更多的案例，这将加强论文中的统计分析。我还将设法更新我关于东欧政党政策立场的数据集，据我所知，这是关于这一主题的唯一定量数据来源，涵盖了自1990年向民主过渡以来的整个时期。因此，我认为它对我自己和其他学者的工作都是一个宝贵的资源。

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.