Pre-electoral coalitions, familiarity, and delays in government formation

Figures & data

Figure 1. Government formation duration in Western Europe, 1945–2019.

Note: The government formations in Belgium 2007 (194 days) and 2010/11 (541 days), as well as in the Netherlands 1977 (208 days) and 2017 (225 days), are not shown in the figure.

Table 1. List of variables (averaged by the sample for model 2 in table 2).

Variables	Mean	SD	Min	Max
Bargaining duration (days)	33.73	33.90	1	225
Post-election	0.72	0.45	0	1
Early election	0.33	0.47	0	1
Fragmentation, BP-weighted	3.48	1.64	0	9.12
Extreme party seat share	0.93	1.10	0	6.05
PEC non-majority	0.15	0.36	0	1
PEC majority	0.06	0.24	0	1
Familiarity	0.25	0.21	0	1
Minority situation	0.88	0.33	0	1

Table 2. Bargaining duration in Western Europe, 1945–2019 (only pure bargaining situations).

	1	2	3	4
Post-election (0/1)	0.973***	0.919***	0.917***	0.858***
	(0.116)	(0.113)	(0.111)	(0.109)
Early election (0/1)	0.0123	−0.000826	−0.0146	−0.0213
	(0.0890)	(0.0836)	(0.0819)	(0.0777)
Fragmentation, BP-weighted	0.0776**	0.0849**	0.0897**	0.101***
	(0.0387)	(0.0375)	(0.0384)	(0.0375)
Extreme party seat share (0–10)	0.290***	0.258***	0.276***	0.239***
	(0.0611)	(0.0601)	(0.0604)	(0.0594)
PEC, non-majority	0.00230	−0.0137	−0.00345	−0.0320
	(0.147)	(0.144)	(0.133)	(0.132)
PEC, majority	−0.412*	−0.257	−0.350	−0.194
	(0.222)	(0.216)	(0.214)	(0.212)
Incumbent majority (0/1)	−0.0889		−0.0993
	(0.0999)		(0.0837)
Familiarity		−0.472*		−0.416*
		(0.284)		(0.234)
Minority situation (0/1)			0.358**	0.341**
			(0.139)	(0.137)
Constant	3.043***	3.334***	2.669***	2.934***
	(0.216)	(0.255)	(0.188)	(0.209)
Observations	336	336	384	384

Negative binomial regression model with country fixed effects. Robust standard errors are in parentheses. *p < 0.10, **p < 0.05, ***p < 0.01. The variable ‘Extreme party seat share’ is re-scaled from 0 to 10 to ease interpretation i.e. a unit increase in extreme party seat share corresponds to a seat share of 10 per cent. The coefficient estimates are the expected log count of the number of days for each predictor. Positive coefficients indicate delays in government formation, while negative coefficients indicate speedier formation processes.

Figure 2. Average marginal effects with 95 per cent confidence intervals.

Figure 3. Predicting bargaining duration in Sweden, 1976–2018.