Umeå University's logo

In parliamentary democracies, elections distribute the seats in parliament, but who gets into government and determines the policy agenda over the course of the legislative term is decided upon after the elections, in negotiations between the political parties. This introduction to the special issue discusses research concerning dynamic approaches to coalition governments. A dynamic approach implies that what happens at the electoral stage influences the government formation stage, which in turn shapes what happens during the government’s tenure, which may influence the cabinet’s durability. Hence, this type of research tries to analyse various stages of a government’s ‘life cycle’ from its ‘birth’ to its ‘death’ as interdependent processes, rather than examining them in mutual isolation. These processes may be restricted to the confines of a self-contained universe of politicians and political parties, or they may involve ‘external’ events, such as, for example, elections, or the state of the economy. In addition to having a dynamic approach to analysing coalitions, the contributions in the special issue use brand-new comparative data from several independent research projects investigating various aspects of coalition politics.

This insightful book brings the study of coalitions and coalition governance in Central and Eastern European democracies up to date, with an analytical focus framed by difficult economic and social periods, such as the end of the economic crisis and the Coronavirus pandemic.

The volume posits insights from a plethora of experts on party politics and coalition studies from their respective countries, with chapters on Bulgaria, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Embellished with illustrative tables and extensive datasets throughout, each chapter maps the developments of party system change, covering the coalition life cycle from the early 1990s until the end of 2021, and explores whether there has been transformation of the coalition, governance and dissolutions patterns due to heightened pressures.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of coalition politics, representative democracy, governance, political parties, European Union politics, East and Central European politics, and comparative politics.

With this book, we update the analysis of politics in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) along the coalition life cycle. Based on ten country chapters, and a concluding comparative chapter, more than 80 tables and several figures, we present and analyse information on the period from 2008 through 2021. The period saw three major crises, the financial crisis, the migration crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic – as well as tendencies towards democratic backlash in some of the countries. In this chapter, we present the coalition life cycle approach in light of the many challenges that faced the CEE countries since 2008. The Russian invasion of Ukraine on March 24, 2022, is outside of our observation period, but it is, of course, a tremendous challenge for the countries in the region and our contributors are among the first to incorporate observations on how that invasion may impact national coalition politics.

This chapter examines the impact of institutional settings on government formation in European democracies. Despite extensive research, there are few definitive conclusions regarding how political institutions influence government formation. For example, some studies suggest that an investiture vote encourages majority coalitions and discourages minority governments, while others find no such relationship. This chapter employs Extreme Bounds Analysis to reevaluate these conflicting findings. The results show that certain claims about the relationship between institutions and cabinet formation are robust (e.g., positive parliamentarism, semi-presidentialism, and constructive vote of no confidence), while others are sensitive to alternative model specifications (e.g., bicameralism).

During the past decade, many parliamentary democracies have experienced bargaining delays when forming governments. The previous literature has attributed protracted government formation processes to a high degree of preference uncertainty among the political parties and a high level of bargaining complexity. The article draws on such theories, but also adds a third theoretical mechanism, commitment problems, and highlights two explanatory variables that have not received much attention so far. The first is pre-electoral coalitions, which are declarations by parties stating that they intend to collaborate with each other after the election. The second is familiarity, which is the mutual trust between parties that comes from having worked together in the past. By combining a large-N study of government formation processes in 17 West European parliamentary democracies (1945–2019) with an in-depth case study of the prolonged Swedish government formation process in 2018–2019, it is shown that pre-electoral coalitions that fail to win a majority can sometimes delay, not speed up, government formation. In addition, a lack of familiarity may sometimes lead to a breakdown of negotiations and drawn-out government formation processes.

The aim of this article is to examine which factors robustly influence cabinet duration in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). In this respect the article investigates the role political institutions (including vote of no-confidence procedures), parliamentary and cabinet attributes, and various contextual factors have on cabinet stability. By using a type of sensitivity analysis (i.e. Extreme Bounds Analysis) on a panel of about 180 cabinets in CEE, it is possible to examine which factors consistently predict the probability of government survival. It is found that only a few factors are robust to alternative model specifications, namely: government type, fragmentation in parliament, the level of unemployment, and restrictive no-confidence votes procedures which make it more difficult for the opposition to bring down a government. Thus, the results indicate that cabinet duration in CEE is not primarily affected by sui generis factors to the region, but by factors of more general relevance.

This chapter focuses on governments in Sweden, a country which a have relatively high share of minority governments, over 70 percent, in the post-war period. Most governments formed during this period have been single-party Social Democratic cabinets, supported by one or more parties in parliament, but there have also been several cases of minority coalitions. Swedish politics has historically been characterized by a strong emphasis on a near-unidimensional political conflict along the left-right policy dimension, and a negative parliamentary system which most likely account for the high occurrence of minority cabinets. The chapter describes Sweden as a prime example of what has been called contract parliamentarism, where minority governments often had support party arrangements in the form of an explicit written contract with one or more opposition parties, publicly committing the partners to a policy agreement. The chapter also shows that minority governments in Sweden have performed well, with a high share of government bills having passed through parliament, a high survival of cabinets, and a high level of electoral support. The legislative successes are partly because of contract parliamentarism but also because opposition parties can gain substantial policy influence by the rather strong parliamentary committee system.