Making the First Move. A Two-Stage Analysis of the Role of Formateurs in Parliamentary Government Formation.

A standard conclusion of theorists who model bargaining as a non-cooperative game is that the party designated to make the first move - the formateur party - will have special powers over the outcome of the bargaining process. Most empirical studies of coalition formation in parliamentary democracies have paid surprisingly little attention to the process of forming a government. In this paper we model government formation as a two-stage unordered discrete choice problem that better reflects the game played by actors involved in the process. The first step involves the selection of a formateur party, and the second step involves the choice of government composition by the formateur. We derive a number of hypotheses for the two stages. To evaluate our hypotheses we perform analyses based on a data set of all governments formed in the Western European countries from 1970 and onward. In our analyses of formateur selection, we find that party size is clearly a dominant feature, the larger a party is, the more likely it is to become formateur. In the second stage analysis, we show that when we aim to predict the government's composition it is fruitful to add information drawn from a first stage analysis. More specifically, we find that potential governments that include the party that is predicted to be the formateur are more likely to form, and that cabinets are more likely to form if they contain parties that are ideologically close to the formateur. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]