When to Coalesce: Early versus Late Coalition Announcement in an Experimental Democracy

Robert E. Goodin, Rupert Sausgruber and Werner Güth ()

Papers on Strategic Interaction from Max Planck Institute of Economics, Strategic Interaction Group

Abstract: In multi-party democracies, several parties usually have to join together in coalition to form government. Many aspects of that process have been fairly fully investigated, others less so. Among the latter is the timing of the formation and announcement of coalitions. While the dominant popular image may be one of parties meeting together after the election to hammer out a coalition agreement, pre-election coalitions of one sort or another are actually quite common. In almost half of the elections in OECD countries since World War II, at least one pair of parties had pre-announced their intention to join together in government. A quarter of governments formed were based wholly (and another quarter in part) on pre-election agreements. To date, such studies as there have been of pre-election coalitions have concentrated primarily on system-level explanations - features of the electoral system (majoritarian or proportional, and so on) that make such arrangements more or less likely. Here we shall instead look more at the agent-level logic of ‘early’ (preelection) versus ‘late’ (post-election) coalition formation, from the point of view of voters and parties.

Pages: 23 pages
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://papers.econ.mpg.de/esi/discussionpapers/2005-10.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Failed to connect to FTP server papers.econ.mpg.de: No such host is known.

Related works:
Journal Article: When to Coalesce: Early Versus Late Coalition Announcement in an Experimental Democracy (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:esi:discus:2005-10

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.econ.mpg. ... arch/ESI/discuss.php

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers on Strategic Interaction from Max Planck Institute of Economics, Strategic Interaction Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Karin Richter ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).