Introduced by Veronica Anghel*.

Multi-party systems lead to coalition governments and with increasing polarization, coalitions are getting harder to form.  Just look at the current situation in Belgium, Italy or Spain.  The challenge is to understand what ‘harder’ means in terms of the interests, bargaining tactics, and payoffs that are in play. The vast and growing literature on coalition formation is the place to look in finding the answers. The editorial team at Government & Opposition is committed to secure ample space for contemporary debates on coalition governments. There is much to learn, understand, and predict about current affairs by looking at coalition formation and termination patterns.  Coalition politics provide important indicators of parties’ ability to compromise and form consensus. The resilience and adaptability of institutional design is critical as political elites increasingly decouple their self-interest from the public interest under the guise of populist rhetoric. This is a special collection of articles that deal with the complexities of coalition administration and the impact these have on government and society.

Coalition payoffs are the end goal of negotiations. Whether policy or office, parties aim for benefits in exchange for supporting a government. Matt Evans shows how formateur parties have an edge in obtaining policy-salient ministerial payoffs, while non-formateurs have an advantage in securing policy-salient deputy (junior) minister positions. The results are not always intuitive.  The highly coveted role of foreign minister is usually distributed to cabinet members from the larger party, and yet there are instances when this office is gained by junior coalition members.  Kai Oppermann and Klaus Brummer show the conditions under which the foreign ministry is likely to be allocated to a ‘junior coalition partner’.

The success of negotiations assumes of course that the parties are willing to come to an agreement.  Not all political parties negotiate in good faith, however, and so make demands that the others cannot tolerate.  Keeping the wolf from the door, in this context, may be the priority for bargaining.  When different sized parties fail to reach common ground in negotiations or there is a consensus reached to leave out extremists, the two largest parties in a parliamentary system may consider the solution to engage in a ‘grand coalition’. By comparing the use of grand coalitions in Austria and Germany, Wade Jacoby investigates the conditions for success of this strategy to rally the party system against insurgent populist challengers. Jacoby also looks at the prospects for failure when this strategy is deployed too often or relied upon too heavily.

Very often, coalition negotiations also lead to the formation of minority governments. Veronica Anghel and Maria Thurk examine the rationality behind this choice.  This is where the question of interests comes into play.  Anghel and Thurk suggest that that ethno-regional parties are mostly policy-seeking and target benefits for their specific groups, while mainstream parties make stronger claims for office distribution. This diversity of interests affects other types of parties as well.  For example, Kate Crowley and Sharon Moore also expose green parties as mostly policy seeking when supporting minority governments and observe that repeat instances of such support can provide the basis for more stable and effective future interparty governing relationships.

The range of interests in play tends to increase with the number of parties and the range of political ideologies added into the mix.  Unsurprisingly, therefore, the European Parliament emerges as an extreme case.  This is not to suggest that the EP cannot function as a parliament, but rather that coalition building in the European Parliament may prove to be an ongoing and continuous process.  Daniel Finke and Annika Herbel show what this means in a legislative context by exploring the ways in which European Union policies may be affected by party groups co-sponsorship of position papers.

Coalition bargaining is a central concern in the study of Government & Opposition.  As research keeps pace with ongoing developments, we hope you will consider joining the conversation. The submission tab is located just under the search window on our home page.

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*Veronica Anghel is a Government & Opposition Fellow.  Find out more about the new fellowship program here.