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Gaining new insights by going local: determinants of coalition formation in mixed democratic polities

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Abstract

We develop a simple spatial model suggesting that Members of Parliament strive for the inclusion of the head of state’s party in coalitions formed in mixed democratic polities, and that parliamentary parties try to assemble coalitions that minimize the ideological distance to the head of state. We identify the German local level of government as functionally equivalent to a parliamentary setting, such that the directly elected mayor has competencies similar to a president in a mixed national polity. Our findings show that the party affiliation of the head of state is a key factor considered by party members in the legislature when forming coalitions: coalitions in the legislature are more likely to form if they include the party of the head of the executive branch. Furthermore, the policy preferences of the head of the executive branch matter for the legislators’ behavior in the coalition formation process: the smaller the ideological distance between the position of a coalition and the position of the head of state, the more likely a coalition is to be formed.

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Fig. 1

Source Calculated on the basis of the data by Cheibub et al. (2010)

Fig. 2
Fig. 3

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Notes

  1. For instance, French presidential candidates formulate their policy positions in a separate platform in which they deviate from the position their parties adopted in their election manifestos (e.g., Laver et al. 2006).

  2. Because of the preference order of the three legislative parties, a coalition between A and C would always include B.

  3. In most cases, mayoral elections do not take place on the same day as local council elections.

  4. Since one advantage of ‘scaling down’ (Snyder 2001) to the local level is fixing contextual features, we are not expecting unobserved heterogeneity in the estimated effects (see Glasgow et al. 2012) owing to our case selection. Nevertheless, we also applied mixed logit models to estimate the empirical models. The results substantially remain the same and likelihood ratio tests confirm that CL models are a better fit to our data than mixed logit models.

  5. The size of the choice set is determined by the number of political groups that are elected to a local council. According to the literature on coalition formation, the number of potential coalitions within a parliament is calculated by 2n − 1, with n as the number of parliamentary represented parties. We exclude those potential outcomes of the coalition formation process in the local councils that include only one party because our definition of a coalition states that at least two parties have to sign a coalition agreement.

  6. Note that our cases share a common feature with mixed regimes (Cheibub and Chernykh 2008, p. 277): the average seat share of the largest party is 0.40, i.e., most of the time no party controls a majority of seats in the local parliament.

  7. This result does not change with variations in the size of local councils, i.e., the number of parliamentary parties. With the exception of the situations wherein 10 parties are represented in parliament and the head of executive branch’s party is included in two out of four formation opportunities, the head of the executive branch’s party is overwhelmingly more likely to be included in local government coalitions. For example, the predicted probabilities range from 81.3% in councils with six parties, over 94.1% in councils with 8 parties, to 100% in councils with 11 or 13 parties, respectively.

  8. We followed Martin and Stevenson (2001) to evaluate whether or not the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assumption is violated by dropping a random set of alternatives from each coalition formation opportunity and applying a Hausman test. We used 50 replications, dropping a random set of 10% of the choices. The average p value is shown in Table 2. It is far greater than 0.05, so we conclude that the IIA assumption is not violated here (see also Chiba et al. 2015).

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  1. Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, University of Munich, Oettingenstraße 67, 80538, Munich, Germany

    Martin Gross

  2. Mannheim Centre for European Social Research & School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim, A5, 6, 68131, Mannheim, Germany

    Marc Debus

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Appendix

Appendix

How substantial is the advantage of party combinations including the head of the executive branch’s party compared to coalitions that include the largest party? One way of addressing this question is to study a case where the head of the executive branch’s party is not the largest party, but is still part of the formed coalition. Figure 3 shows the predicted probabilities for coalitions including the party of the head of the executive branch and for coalitions comprising the largest party, respectively, for the case of the city of Remscheid after the 2009 elections for the local council.

When ignoring the variable inclusion of head of the executive branch’s party, the model predicts a higher probability (73.3%) for coalitions covering the largest party—the CDU in the selected case of Remscheid 2009—compared to coalitions including the SPD with 43.5% of the council seats, which was the mayor’s party of this city. Once we add information on whether coalitions include the party of the head of the executive branch, the predictions of the model clearly change and are in line with the actual outcome of the coalition formation process: the chances of a coalition forming that includes the mayor’s party is 86.4%, whereas the estimated probability for a coalition including the largest party in the city council is 75.0%. The actually formed coalition consisted of Social Democrats, FDP and Greens, and thus included the party of the mayor, but not the Christian Democrats, which was the strongest party on the Remscheid city council elected in 2009. Including the variable head of the executive branch’s party thus is necessary to predict the actual outcome of the coalition formation process (see also Table 5 for an overview on the characteristics of the independent variables).

Table 5 Descriptive statistics of independent variables
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Gross, M., Debus, M. Gaining new insights by going local: determinants of coalition formation in mixed democratic polities. Public Choice 174, 61–80 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-017-0489-x

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