Office and policy payoffs in coalition governments Marc Debus Presentation by: Jacopo Gandin

Which parties in a multiparty system have to be considered as key players in the coalition- building game? And, if they exist: Can we make predictions about office and policy payoffs for these parties in the government formation? Research questions

Definitions Key parties are defined by many coalition theories having superior powers in terms of coalition formation. Dominant player (Peleg 1981): a party that should be included in the government because of its parliamentary seat strenght. Central player (van Deemen 1991; van Roozendaal 1993): a party that holds a pivotal position due to the inclusion of median legislator.

Models The author uses two models, drawn from the spatial theory of voting tradition, to define key actors in the coalition building process. The first is the portfolio allocation model (Laver & Shepsle 1990), assuming that every party in the coalition receives a portfolio according to its own issue salience. The second is the political heart model (Schofield 1986), where key parties are supposed to be the parties bounding the “heart” (space delimited by the medians.

Theories of Coalition Politics A starting point can be to analyse the motivation for a party to put itself in coalition. The first approach is called office- orientated, and takes into account as a variable only party parliamentary seat strenght. The second is the policy- orientated approach, considering party position before and after elections in order to define their multidimensional programmatic position.

Portfolio allocation This approach is based on the idea of ministerial government. Each party tries to get a minister in the issue(s)that it considers salient.Who gets a portfolio can be the policy setter with regard to that issue. A government can be only formed by strong or very strong parties, that, according to Laver & Shepsle definition: a strong party is present with at least one minister in all possible coalitions preferred by every actor to the status quo.

Political heart We have to take into account the distinction between dominant and peripheral parties. Dominant parties must be members of every possible government. Dominant: a party located at the core of the intercepts between all medians. If a dominant party does not exists, the only possible coalitions are formed by parties located at the bound of the core. Example: Belgium only possible coalitions according to the core: PSB-PVV, PSB-CVP and CVP- PVV.

Institutional and behavioural constraints That hypotesis was not verified in the reality: the coalition in Belgium 1978 was CVP-PSB-FDF-VU. That was because institutional rules ensured equal representation to Flemish and Walloon components, forcing FDF (Walloon) and VU (Flemish), to be included in the coalition. In this case, institutions represent a limit to the spatial theory of voting, as in other cases behavioural aspects do (ex. Pre- electoral agreements- Germany 2005: FDP with CDU and w/o SPD- SPD and Greens w/o Die Linke).

Effects of these constraints There are some differences among actors during the coalition building process. Parties that don't reject any a priori coalition would get a higher payoff in the game than parties avoiding some particular coalition possibililities. In the latter case they break the core and modify the political heart, favouring parties standing inside the new asset, that should increase their blackmail potential. Behavioural constraints can strongly modified each party's coalition potential.

Case selection Selected cases: Austria , Belgium , Ireland oo2, Germany , the Netherlands Similarities: 1) classifiable by Laver & Schofield typology (1998) about party system: unipolar, bipolar or multipolar. 2) frequent a priori coalition statements and alliance rejection.

Method Ideological competition is based on conflicts in economic and social policy, referring to Laver & Hunt data (1992). A third country- specific dimension is included: Austria, Germany, the Netherlands: foreign policy Belgium: decentralization Ireland: position about Northern Ireland In this way the author checks the presence of possible modified heart parties.

Method Since expert surveys do not make difference between party and government position, the author refers to some policy documents: the coalition agreements contained in the election manifestos. Party ideology is weighted both on position and on issue saliency. Values are assigned with the wordscore method. To evaluate pre- electoral statements the author analyses electoral campaigns, considering only potential coalitions.

Findings The differences between original and modified solutions are quite relevant, either by using strong party or political heart model. Strong party model does not seems to fit very well: the modified solution corrects the original one in 8 of 28 cases. In 7/28 cases the model gives a wrong prediction. Original political heart model often includes an extremely wide range of parties; after the correction every time the resulting party is included in the coalition

Findings In 10/39 cases all coalition members are exactly predicted by the modified political heart model. Just in 2 cases a party that was not predicted by any model appears in the coalition: they are Belgium 1988 and Ireland 1994, where peripheral parties were included in the coalition. Behavioural reasons stand at the basis of the correction of FPOE strong party role in 1994: OEVP in that year ruled out any alliance with the liberal formation, unlike 1990 and 1995.

What means to be a key player? A key player should be able to get a greater number of offices in government than its actual parliamentary seat share. Furthermore, a key party should be closer to its programmatic position mentioned in the coalition agreement. The latter expectation is tested against the assumption that large parties are more likely to achieve their policy goals.

Testing the hypoteses The author tests his hypoteses by means of the formula pointing out the Euclidean distance between programmatic positions contained in a coalition agreement and that of a strong party,weighted by issue salience. FORMULA He compares this measure with intra- coalition strenght (measure by % of parliamentary seat share) and share of captured offices.

Office and policy findings According to the author,using modified strong party method the first hypotesis is weakly confirmed: only in 4/21 cases a strong party gets a higher number of offices than its intra- coalition strenght. The correlation seems to be stronger with regard to the second hypotesis: if consider it, we observe that in 14 cases over 21 key parties remain closer to their programmatic platforms.

Office and policy findings The modified political heart method seems to provide similar outcomes: with regard to the first hypotesis, 8/24 cases (33.3%) get a higher payoffs than their intra- coalition strenght. The second hypotesis on the contrary is slightly confirmed: 83.3 % of cases (20/24) show how we can argue with good approximation that be a key party means the possibility to remain close to the political position expressed at the moment of coalition agreement.

Conclusions The author states that by method of modified strong party (portfolio allocation) we can only find out the existance of strong parties (as in 28 over 39 cases happens). By the modified political heart system, we can generalize about the partisan composition of next government, and observe how this method is reliable for what concerns policy payoffs, less for office payoffs predictions.