Coalition Formation and the German Party System

Abstract

The article uses a thick synthetic analytical framework, derived from the established coalition literature to examine the process of coalition formation in the context of the German party system at the time of the 2009 federal election. It argues that increasing party system fragmentation and fluidity are long-term effects of the critical changes that took place between 1983 and the mid-1990s. These changes have shifted coalition power away from the smaller parties, and in particular the FDP, and towards the two Volksparteien. In terms of the coalition game, the article argues that outcomes cannot be explained by pure office-seeking but that these motives do become important once the desire to avoid unnecessary co-ordination costs, achieve ideological adjacency and reduce ideological range to a minimum has been satisfied. The article concludes by asserting that, rather than being a re-constitution of the default coalition model in Germany, the logic of the 2009 Black–Yellow coalition is consistent with more recent coalition games and therefore is a reflection of change rather than continuity.

Notes

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There was a renewal of interest in the Social–Liberal option during the brief tenure of Kurt Beck as chairman of the SPD from 2006 to 2008 but this came to nothing. Nevertheless, the possibility of a Social–Liberal coalition being formed in the future, or even the more implausible coalition between the SPD, FDP and Greens, cannot be ruled out unequivocally.

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Gordon Smith identified four key rules of the game that, in his famous phrase, contributed to a ‘politics of centrality’. First, Germany's system of proportional representation (augmented by a 5 per cent hurdle to representation), which promotes a pattern of coalition government, limits the number of viable parties within the party system, and serves to shut out parties of the extreme right and left. Second, the idea of the Partienstaat, which raised the public esteem of political parties in the early post-war years, gave them a direct stake in the maintenance of the state and the enhancement of its legitimacy, and thus discouraged the emergence of the ‘anti-system’ sentiment within the parties that helped undermine the Weimar Republic. Third, ‘chancellor democracy’ and the principle of Richtlinienkompetenz, which established the office of federal chancellor as primus inter pares, avoiding the constitutional tussles between chancellor and president that characterised the Weimar years. Fourth, the rule that requires the Bundestag to give a ‘constructive vote of no confidence’ before voting out an incumbent chancellor. These four elements serve to narrow the ideological range of ‘relevant’ parties (parties that are considered to be koalitionsfähig), enhance the status of the federal chancellor as leader of the governing coalition, and increase the opportunity costs of either exit from an existing coalition or the formation of rival coalitions (see G. Smith, Democracy in Western Germany, 3rd edition (London: Heinemann, 1986).

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This is a relaxation of the unitary actor assumption that underpins the kind of coalition modelling that uses point measurements in n-dimensional space. This does not mean, however, that using such spatial point measurements is a redundant approach: see, for instance, C. Kam, W. Bianco, I. Sened and R. Smyth, ‘Ministerial Selection and Intraparty Organisation in the Contemporary British Parliament’, American Political Science Review 104/2 (2010), pp.289–306.

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HHIs normally range from 0 to 1000 and the HHI increases as the number of firms in a market decreases and the disparity in their sizes increases. Conversely, HHIs approach zero under conditions in which large numbers of firms of roughly equal size operate. To demonstrate how HHIs work in the analysis of party systems, let us look at three ideal types: (1) one-party rule; (2) a classic two-party majoritarian system; and (3) a ‘pure’ multi-party system, all set in a fictional legislature of 100 seats with a simple ‘decision rule’ (i.e. the criteria for commanding a legislative majority) of 50 per cent + one seat. Under conditions of one-party rule, the ruling party controls all 100 seats and this yields the maximum possible HHI of 1000. Multi-party systems of all kinds yield scores of less than 1 and our ideal-type two-party majoritarian system (based on the ruling party controlling 51 seats and the opposition party 49 seats, with no third parties) would yield an HHI of 500, whilst a pure multi-party system (100 parties, each holding one seat each) would yield an HHI of 1.

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Banzhaf scores are a function of the Banzhaf power index, which is also known as the Penrose–Banzhaf index. The index is designed to measure the probability of changing an outcome when voting rights amongst actors are not equally distributed. The index counts the number of critical voters who, if they were to change their vote from ‘yes’ to ‘no’, would cause a measure to fail. This is a swing vote. The score is expressed as a fraction of all of such swing votes each actor could cast. See J.F. Banzhaf, III, ‘Weighted Voting Doesn't Work: A Mathematical Analysis’, Rutgers Law Review, 19 (1965), pp.317–43; also L. Penrose, ‘The Elementary Statistics of Majority Voting’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 109/1 (1946), pp.53–57.

C. Hawley, ‘Angela Merkel's “Project Haze”’, Spiegel Online, 2009, available at http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,655375,00.html (accessed 16 Oct. 2009).

See for instance an ARD poll for July 2010: 77 per cent felt Merkel has lost control and 62 per cent expected it to fail in the near future, available from http://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/bilder/crbilderstrecke140_mtb-1_pos-11.html

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