Search

Coalition governments generally involve policy compromises from the parties involved, but how do party supporters react to these agreements? Drawing on a new study covering the Spanish general election in November 2019, Carolina Plescia, Alejandro Ecker and Thomas M. Meyer find that the more attached voters are to parties, the harder it is for them to accept compromises. There is also evidence that voters find it more difficult to give in on important issues.

Multiparty government in parliamentary democracies entails bargaining over the payoffs of government participation, in particular the allocation of cabinet positions. While most of the literature deals with the numerical distribution of cabinet seats among government parties, this article explores the distribution of individual portfolios. It argues that coalition negotiations are sequential choice processes that begin with the allocation of those portfolios most important to the bargaining parties. This induces conditionality in the bargaining process as choices of individual cabinet positions are not independent of each other. Linking this sequential logic with party preferences for individual cabinet positions, the authors of the article study the allocation of individual portfolios for 146 coalition governments in Western and Central Eastern Europe. The results suggest that a sequential logic in the bargaining process results in better predictions than assuming mutual independence in the distribution of individual portfolios.