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The success and longevity of coalition governments depends on the ability to keep conflicts between coalition members at bay. The risk of such conflicts is often assessed by drawing on proxy measures, such as the ideological heterogeneity among government parties. This article presents a new approach to measuring the atmosphere between government parties. The ‘coalition mood’ is a time-varying measure that draws on applause patterns between coalition partners during legislative debates. The article exemplifies the measurement approach based on automated analyses of over 105,000 plenary debates in Germany and Austria. The article then assesses the measure's face, concurrent and predictive validity. It finds the measure well aligned with qualitative evidence, shows that the coalition mood is correlated with poll ratings of the government parties and helps to predict the duration of legislative processes. The conclusion highlights future applications of the coalition mood for research on coalition politics and public policy.

Twitter has become one of the primary platforms for politicians to interact with the public. Consequently, research into politicians’ Twitter usage has proliferated with attempts at measuring increasingly complex concepts such as ideology or policy attitudes. So far, many of these studies either implicitly or explicitly assume that politicians’ Twitter accounts are operated by politicians themselves and that politicians are free to present their “true” attitudes and positions. We conducted an elite survey in Germany and present evidence that these assumptions only partially hold true. In our sample, only around a third of Twitter accounts are operated by the corresponding politician alone. In our view, this is a conservative estimate and should further decrease as political elites’ social media strategies professionalize over the coming years. We also find that most politicians state that there are no party guidelines regarding Twitter and that their tweets are not checked by a central authority in the party. We discuss the implications of our findings for research on social media in general.

Most parliamentary democracies have seen a rise of populist radical parties during the past decades. Many countries have also experienced severely delayed government formation processes, with caretaker governments in office for extended periods of time. Are these delays related to the rise of radical parties? We argue that the rise of populist radical parties may prolong the bargaining process, due to the fact that these parties are often treated as pariahs by other parties during election campaigns, which creates a complex bargaining situation after the election. We evaluate this claim by studying 121 government formation processes in the German States from 1990 until 2021, using original data which includes statements made by parties during election campaigns. The findings show that a higher share of seats allocated to parties from the radical right and radical left results in an increasing amount of days until a new government is voted into office. We also find that when a party that has been characterized as being ‘non-coalitionable’ during the election campaign ends up among the negotiating parties, the government formation process is severely delayed. These findings suggest that the rise of populist radical parties may create severe challenges for parliamentary democracy.