Excluded coalitions and the 2013 German federal election

ABSTRACT

In a recent article, Hiller introduced a value for cooperative games considering that players exclude coalitions with other players – the value (excluded coalitions value). One reason for developing the value was to improve the analysis of parliaments, since prior to elections, parties issue coalition statements and exclude cooperation with parties. In this article, we use the value to analyse the influence of coalition statements on the bargaining strength of the parties after the 2013 German federal election. More specifically, we calculate the distribution of power in German government coalitions that were possible with respect to the opinion polls in the time prior to the election.

KEYWORDS:

• EC value
• voting power
• coalition statements
• government coalition
• x power index

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C71
• D72

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ In the field of evolutionary game theory Shi, Pan, and Peng (2017) and Shi and Pan (2017) analyse neutral agents and different social groups.

² According to Aumann and Drèze (1974), components are active groups as in our understanding of government coalitions. In contrast, the Owen value (Owen 1977) interprets the components as bargaining unions.

³ CDU/CSU: Christian Democratic/Social Union, FDP: Free Democratic Party, SPD: Social Democratic Party of Germany, Grüne: Green Party, and Linke: Left Party.

⁴ A more detailed survey of power indices is presented in Felsenthal and Machover (1998), Saari and Sieberg (2001) and Felsenthal and Machover (2005).

⁵ Indeed, only minimum winning coalitions have governed in Germany since 1961.

⁶ With this interpretation, Wiese (2007) introduces the Wiese power index, which is similar to the power index.

⁷ For the specific coalition statements in 2013 see Christian Democratic/Social Union (2013), Social Democratic Party of Germany (2013), Free Democratic Party (2013), Green Party (2013) and Left Party (2013).

⁸ In addition, the following relations between the parties’ seats are predicted by the opinion polls: .