Government Formation after the 2009 Federal Election: The Remake of the Christian–Liberal Coalition under New Patterns of Party Competition

Abstract

The question ‘who gets in?’ is one of the central research areas in studies on coalition politics. This paper analyses government formation after the 2009 Bundestag elections in Germany. On the basis of the ‘Political Heart’ model, which is modified in a way so as to include the parties' pre-electoral coalition statements, it is argued that the Christian Democrats maintained a pivotal position during the 2009 German coalition formation game. In a second step, the probabilities for all coalition options are estimated on the basis of the seat distribution in the 17th Bundestag and in a hypothetical parliament where the CDU/CSU and FDP do not have a majority. The results show that, firstly, a Christian–Liberal coalition was by far the most likely outcome of the actual government formation process. If, however, CDU/CSU and FDP had not achieved a parliamentary majority, then a remake of the ‘grand coalition’ between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats would be the most likely result of the coalition negotiations. Secondly, the data reveals that the so-called ‘Jamaica coalition’ between Christian Democrats, FDP and Greens and a coalition between SPD, Greens and the ‘Linke’ would be a realistic alternative to a ‘grand coalition’.

Notes

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Because the CDU and CSU form a common parliamentary party group in the Bundestag and draft a common election manifesto, we deal with both parties as a unitary actor.

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In accordance with the general literature on coalition formation, we define also single party (minority) governments as a potential coalition.

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Bräuninger and Debus, ‘Der Einfluss von Koalitionsaussagen’; Thomas Bräuninger and Marc Debus, Parteienwettbewerb in den deutschen Bundesländern (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011 (forthcoming)).

M. Laver, K. Benoit and J. Garry, 'Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data', American Political Science Review 97/2 (2003), pp.311–31; W. Lowe, ‘Understanding Wordscores’, Political Analysis 16/4 (2008), pp.356–71; for a more detailed description of the data see Bräuninger and Debus, Parteienwettbewerb in den deutschen Bundesländern.

We do not incorporate the estimated standard errors in the policy positions of parties when identifying the location of the median lines.

see also F.U. Pappi and S. Shikano, ‘Regierungsabwahl ohne Regierungsneuwahl?’, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 46/4 (2005), pp.513–26.

Here, we define a coalition in a broader sense, so that even single-party governments are identified as a potential coalition that could form after an election. The number of coalitions is thus calculated by applying the formula 2 ⁿ – 1, where n marks the number of parties represented in a legislature.

For details on the results of the regression model, see Bräuninger and Debus, ‘Der Einfluss von Koalitionsaussagen’; Bräuninger and Debus, Parteienwettbewerb.

See Bräuninger and Debus, ‘Der Einfluss von Koalitionsaussagen’.

D. McFadden, 'Conditional Logit Analysis of Qualitative Choice Behaviour', in P. Zarembka (ed.), Frontiers in Econometrics (New York: Academic Press, 1973), pp.105–42; M.R. Alvarez and J. Nagler, ‘When Politics and Models Collide: Estimating Models of Multiparty Elections’, American Journal of Political Science 42/1 (1998), pp.55–96.

See, e.g., Adams et al., A Unified Theory of Party Competition.

See, e.g., Martin and Stevenson, ‘Government Formation in Parliamentary Democracies’; Pappi et al., ‘Regierungsbildung in Mehrebenensystemen’; Warwick, Policy Horizons and Parliamentary Government.

Von Neumann and Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour.

Leiserson, Coalitions in Politics; Leiserson, ‘Factions and Coalitions in One-Party Japan’.

Austen-Smith and Banks, ‘Elections, Coalitions, and Legislative Outcomes’; see also B. Peleg, ‘Coalition Formation in Simple Games with Dominant Players’, International Journal of Game Theory 10/1 (1981), pp.11–33; A. van Deemen, ‘Dominant Players and Minimum Size Coalitions’, European Journal of Political Research 17/3 (1989), pp.313–32.

We only include the residuals of a logistic regression on the variable ‘pre-electoral alliance’ in our regression model to be safe from endogeneity problems (see Bräuninger and Debus, ‘Der Einfluss von Koalitionsaussagen’, p.331).

Franklin and Mackie, ‘Familiarity and Inertia’.

See also Bäck and Dumont, ‘Combining Large-n and Small-n Strategies’, p.477.

Franklin and Mackie, ‘Familiarity and Inertia’.

This finding is not trivial, as parties sometimes – like the Hessian SPD in 2008 – act against the commitments they made before the elections.

for a more detailed analysis of the regression results see Bräuninger and Debus, ‘Der Einfluss von Koalitionsaussagen’.

See R. Schmitt-Beck and T. Faas, ‘The Campaign and its Dynamics at the 2005 German General Election’, German Politics 15/4 (2006), 293–319. The parties' seat shares in the second scenario are based on several opinion polls from the early summer that projected no majority for CDU/CSU and FDP. See http://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/index.htm for a compilation of polls prior to the 2009 Bundestag elections. The results of the regression model remain stable if we further change the seat distribution assumed in scenario II. There are small changes in the probabilities for each party combination to become the next coalition government, which, however, do not significantly differ from the predictions described in Table 4.

Schofield, ‘Political Competition and Multiparty Coalition Governments’; Schofield, ‘Coalition Politics. A Formal Model and Empirical Analysis’.