Assembly dissolution powers and incumbency advantages in coalition formation

Abstract

Are dominant governing parties with discretion to call early elections better able to negotiate their return to office? Dominant incumbents in parliamentary democracies sometimes have extensive powers to dissolve parliament, which enables them to affect coalition bargaining. Yet, whether these powers advantage them in forming the next coalition remains poorly understood. To address this gap, this article develops a theory of coalition formation in the shadow of parliamentary dissolution. Incumbents who can dissolve the assembly, it argues, are more likely to return to government than their peers who lack this power because they enjoy greater bargaining leverage and reputational advantages in coalition formation. The article tests this expectation using mixed and conditional logistic regression analysis of data on 631 government formation opportunities and 433,401 potential coalitions and finds that coalition leaders with discretion to dissolve parliament secure significant advantages in negotiating their return to power.

Keywords:

• Assembly dissolution
• coalition formation
• cabinet formation
• incumbency advantage
• legislative bargaining

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers, the journal editors, the editors of this special issue and the participants of the workshop on ‘Coalition Dynamics: Advances in the Study of the Coalition Life-Cycle’ in Vienna, November 2021, for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In addition, incumbents can also benefit from a preference for familiarity, prior success of governing together, electoral gains, or aversion to the bargaining costs of negotiating a new coalition (Franklin and Mackie 1983; Martin and Stevenson 2010; Tavits 2008; Warwick 1996). Our empirical analysis controls for such preferences.

2 We follow the widespread consensus of conceptualizing a government formation opportunity as arising with every inter-electoral government termination (through a change of prime minister or governing parties) and general election (Müller and Strøm 2000: 12). Note, however, that some scholars discount formation opportunities in which government composition changes but there is “no opportunity” to select a new PM party (Glasgow et al. 2011: 943). This approach assumes that PM parties which survive coalition re-negotiations were never at risk and discounts the uncertainty inherent in the bargaining process. For the purposes of our study, whether or not a PM party holds on to office – for instance, when a coalition partner defects or tensions in the government require broadened legislative support – is an outcome of theoretical interest. For this reason, we apply the most widely applied conceptualization of a government formation opportunity rather than limiting the sample.

3 Constitutionally, dissolution power is never placed in the hands of a minor coalition partner alone. Hence, to the extent that these parties influence assembly dissolution, it is via the collective powers of the cabinet.

4 “Danish PM names new coalition ministers, reducing risk of snap poll,” Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-denmark-government-idUSKBN13N0NW

5 “Danish Premier Expands Ruling Coalition in Drive to Lower Taxes,” Bloomberg, 27 November 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-27/danish-government-set-to-expand-into-coalition-of-three-parties

6 “Finnish Premier Faces Dwindling Options to Avoid Election,” Bloomberg, 13 June 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-12/finnish-premier-faces-dwindling-options-to-avoid-new-election

7 “Finnish PM to break up coalition, kick out nationalists,” Reuters, 12 June 2017, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-finland-government-idUSKBN1932AA

8 https://theconversation.com/boris-johnsons-move-to-purge-21-no-deal-brexit-rebels-will-have-electoral-consequences-122983

9 In OA 2.3 we examine further assumptions that underpin our empirical strategy, including concerns about compound causation.

10 The countries and time periods included in our sample are: Australia 1946-2013, Austria 1945–2008, Belgium 1946–2011, Bulgaria 1991-2014, Croatia 2000-2011, the Czech Republic 1993-2014, Denmark 1945–2014, Estonia 1992-2015, Finland 1944–2014, France IV 1945-1958, France V 1959-2014, Germany 1949-2013, Greece 1974-2013, Hungary 1990-2014, Iceland 1942-2013, Ireland 1944–2011, Israel 1949-2006, Italy 1946–2014, Latvia 1990-2014, Lithuania 1990-2012, Luxembourg 1945–2013, Netherlands 1946–2012, Norway 1945–2013, Poland 1989-2014, Portugal 1975-2011, Romania 1990-2014, Slovakia 1990-2012, Slovenia 1990-2013, Spain 1977-2011, Sweden 1945–2010, Turkey 1983-2014, and UK 1945-2010.

11 A robustness test in which the analysis is restricted to European governments is available in OA 2.5.

12 Including all coalitions that could potentially form in studies of coalition formation is standard practice in the field (Martin and Stevenson 2001, Martin and Stevenson 2010). This is because it is not possible to establish whether a factor makes coalition formation more (or less) likely by studying only those coalitions that form or are most likely to form. Such an approach would be equivalent to selecting on the dependent variable.

13 Our identification of potential coalitions and the calculation of party ideology related independent variables is based on parties included in the comparative manifesto data set (Volkens et al. 2016).

14 The index scores for PMs and governments in the countries and time periods covered by our data are available in the supplementary information, table OA 1.4.

15 An alternative specification adopting a lower threshold of 5 (the mid-point on the 0-10 scale) for recording extensive dissolution powers is available in OA 2.1.

16 Alternative measures of party positions based on expert opinions offer static snapshots that do not adequately capture changes in party positions over time (Budge 2000).

17 Martin and Stevenson (2010, 509–510) construct their familiarity index by measuring to what extent each pair of parties has experience of governing together, weighted by their expected portfolio shares, summed across all such pairs to create the potential government’s familiarity score, and discounted by time elapsed.

18 Previous work suggests that additional variables, including pre-electoral pacts, anti-pacts, and the conflictual termination of the previous government may influence coalition formation. Data regarding these attributes are not available for our full dataset. We address the concern that these variables might be omitted confounders by re-estimating our main model on the sub-sample for which these variables are available (results reported in OA 2.2).

19 Conditional logit models are computationally efficient but are based on an assumption that outcomes are independent of irrelevant alternatives (IIA), which implies that the probability of choosing one coalition does not depend on other alternatives in the choice set. When employing the conditional logit model, we follow Martin and Stevenson (2001) and test for global violations of the IAA assumption (however, note Glasgow et al.’s (2012) reservations about this test). Mixed logit models make it possible to relax the IIA assumption but are computationally complex, which can generate identification problems and render parameter estimates unstable.

20 The bottom row of table 1 reports p-values for the test of the IAA assumption recommended by Martin and Stevenson (2001), which indicate that the assumption is not globally violated in our application the conditional logit model.

21 We employ the conditional logit model for robustness testing because a mixed logit model yields substantively very similar results but gives rise to identification and separation problems in several of the supplementary analyses.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Petra Schleiter

Petra Schleiter is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include political institutions, political behaviour, and political parties. She has published in in leading interdisciplinary and disciplinary journals such as PLOS One, American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, World Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Political Science Research and Methods, International Studies Quarterly and elsewhere. [[email protected]]

Cristina Bucur

Cristina Bucur (PhD, MBA) is Adjunct Assistant Professor of comparative politics at University College Dublin and applied research manager at KPMG Future Analytics. Cristina’s work on executive-legislative relations in parliamentary and semi-presidential systems has been published in journals such as Party Politics, Political Studies Review, Political Research Quarterly, Comparative European Politics, French Politics, as well as several edited volumes. [[email protected]/[email protected]]