New Developments in the Study of Coalition Governments

This edited volume suggests promising new avenues of research in analyzing coalition politics. Written by a group of leading scholars, the book clarifies a number of concepts too often taken for granted in the existing literature, performs theoretically-driven and methodologically novel comparative studies of the effects of institutions on coalition formation, revisits old empirical puzzles, provides seminal analyses of how party leaders combine coalition governance solutions to anticipate risks pertaining to multiparty governing, and confronts coalition theories to new empirical terrains.

The first chapters clarify core concepts found in the literature, such as the distinction between positive and negative parliaments, and investigate the internal variety of important phenomena, such as early elections and caretaker cabinets. These chapters  provide new typologies and analyses of the conditions under which they are most likely to occur. The following contributions look at the effects of institutions, such as bicameralism, on coalition formation processes and outcomes. We then focus on one of the most enduring empirical puzzle in coalition theory, minority governments. One chapter provides a comprehensive analysis of the incidence, maintenance and performance of these governments that do not rely on a majority in parliament. Several other chapters of the volume, using different research strategies and angles, also revisit the old puzzle of their frequency; together these chapters constitute the richest comparative study to date on what classical coalition theories failed to predict. The final chapters of the volume provide an array of new research paths taken in coalition studies: the first of these contributions looks at coalition governance and investigates the various combinations of mutual control mechanisms set up by coalition partners; the two final chapters expand the empirical coverage of coalition studies to respectively presidential settings and the local level of government authority. The latter looks in particular at one of the major challenges of coalition politics in the 21st century, the increasingly burning question of the coalition participation or exclusion of radical, populist parties.

Building on comparative theoretical and empirical knowledge over multiparty governments to draw useful lessons and recommend new research paths in increasingly challenging times for the formation and stability of coalitions across a wide range of political settings, this volume will be of use to students and scholars interested in electoral politics, comparative institutions and governance.

Patrick Dumont is Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University, Canberra (Australia). He has been visiting researcher at the Peltason Center for the Study of Democracy, University of California, Irvine (2014-2015). He is co-editor of the Routledge Research on Social and Political Elites book series, was the co-founder of the Standing Group on Elites and Political Leadership of the European Consortium for Political Research, and its co-convenor from 2015 to 2021, as well as chair of the Research Committee on 'Elites' of the International Political Science Association from 2018 to 2023. He has published extensively on coalition politics; his recent research projects also focus on electoral campaigns and political representation in Europe and Australia.

Bernard Grofman is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine (US) and former director of the Peltason Center for the Study of Democracy. Professor Grofman’s research focuses on voting behaviour, redistricting, the impact of electoral rules on political outcomes, and behavioral social choice. He has published numerous books including A Unified Theory of Party Competition, A Unified Theory of Voting, and Electoral Laws and their Political Consequences along with hundreds of journal articles.

Torbjörn Bergman is Senior Professor of Political Science at Umeå University (Sweden). He has previously held Research Chair positions at the Luleå University of Technology and Södertörn University Stockholm. He has also been a Visiting Researcher at the University of California, San Diego (1999-2000) and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (2006-2007). His research is particularly focused on the struggle for government power and the issue of democracy at two interconnected levels, Sweden and the EU. He has notably co-edited several reference volumes on coalition politics at Oxford University Press. Prof. Bergman has established a large Internet-based data archive that includes information about all democratic governments in Europe's stable parliamentary democracies since World War II. This data archive, which is widely used by comparative political scientists and in particular coalition politics scholars, is available at https://repdem.org/.

Tom Louwerse is Associate Professor in Political Science at Leiden University (The Netherlands).  His main areas of interest include elections, political representation, parliaments, political parties, elections, polls and voting advice applications. His main research project, Who opposes?, focuses on government-opposition cooperation in parliament and its consequences for democratic legitimacy and vote choice. It is supported by a Vidi grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Well published in the field of coalition politics, Prof. Louwerse is in addition very active in outreach initiatives such as the poll aggregation projects Peilingwijzer in the Netherlands and the Irish Polling Indicator.