The Political geography of government formation: Why regional parties join coalitions

Political parties differ in the geographic distribution of their support. This article argues that a regionalized distribution of a party's votes facilitates its participation in government, because it produces a tendency to prioritize demands for locally targeted goods that are more conducive to the negotiation of reciprocal logrolling agreements with potential partners. Using a measure based on the Gini coefficient, I empirically evaluate the extent to which the geographic concentration of votes plays a role in the formation of governments, taking Spanish local elections from 1987 to 2011 as a test bed. With around 500 formation opportunities and 20,000 potential governments, multinomial choice models are estimated (conditional and mixed logits) and a very sizable effect is documented: A one-standard deviation increase in the electoral geographic concentration of the members of a potential government almost doubles the likelihood of its formation. These findings are relevant for students of government formation, regional parties, and political geography

Portfolio allocation under decentralization

Decentralization shapes the way policy authority is shared between the national and regional levels and that, I argue, will have consequences for government formation. In particular, I contend that the allocation of portfolios in regional coalition governments will be affected by the degree of decentralization of each policy. To analyze this relationship I exploit the cross-time, cross-regional, and cross-policy variation of the process of competence devolution to the Spanish Autonomous Communities between 1980 and 2010. I find that, as expected, an increase in the competences managed by the region in a given policy jurisdiction makes the related portfolio more attractive to all coalition parties, although the effect seems to be particularly significant in economically strong and fast-track regions

Parties getting impatient: Time out of office and portfolio allocation in coalition governments

This article argues that long periods out of office make parties impatient and more willing to make concessions over portfolio allocation in exchange for participation in a coalition cabinet. Two hypotheses are analysed: on the one hand, being in opposition for a long time should put parties at a disadvantage when bargaining over office payoffs. On the other, this effect should not apply to the formateur party, since formation offers are based on the receivers' impatience. The empirical results largely support these expectations. Additional evidence of the causality of the main effect is obtained through the use of matching techniques based on the propensity score

The Use of control mechanisms in coalition governments: The role of preference tangentiality and repeated interactions

In this article I argue that coalitions will tend to employ control mechanisms to facilitate the adoption of compromise policies only when the expected benefit of their use is high enough. When partners are already satisfied with log-rolling policies (compartmentalized by jurisdiction), or when compromise is already attainable self-enforcingly, there are few incentives to use them. Conversely, when partners are interested in compromise policies but are unable to reach that outcome in equilibrium, then control mechanisms are likely to be implemented. The empirical evidence offered tends to support the two main hypotheses of this work: control mechanisms are less necessary when the tangentiality of partners' preferences is high and when they foresee frequent mutual interactions. However, that seems to work better for the allocation of watchdog junior ministers rather than for the writing of comprehensive policy agreements

Preferences for political coalitions in Spain

Spanish parties evaluate whether or not to close deals with other parties for a number of reasons, the coalition preferences of their voters being a likely one. This work explores to what extent party preferences and ideological proximity in the two main dimensions of political competition in Spain affect voters' coalition preferences. Using survey data from 2009, we find that voters' coalition preferences are greatly affected by ideological proximity especially in the left-right axis, whereas preferences for decentralization happen to be much more salient for the supporters of regionalist parties. However, this general pattern varies depending on the assessed coalition

The Legislative dynamics of political decentralization in parliamentary democracies

We investigate how particular configurations of national parliaments affect the dynamics of political decentralization in parliamentary democracies. Recent research has emphasized the impact of structural determinants on levels of decentralization across countries. However, we argue that decentralization processes are endogenous to legislative bargaining by political parties. Our main hypothesis is that, ceteris paribus, the greater the legislative bargaining power of parties with decentralization demands, the more likely decentralization reforms are to occur. For that purpose, we calculate an index of the parliamentary salience of decentralization that reflects the distribution of parties' preferences for decentralization weighted by their bargaining power. We test our hypotheses with dynamic models for 19 parliamentary democracies using Comparative Manifesto Project data and the Regional Authority Index. We demonstrate that the dynamics of decentralization are crucially shaped by the configuration of national legislatures, although this only seems to affect the self-rule dimension of decentralization rather than shared rule

The Arithmetics of partisanship and policy outcomes in parliamentary democracies

Empirical assessments of partisan models of politics have primarily focused on the relationship between government composition and policy outcomes. However, we argue that it is necessary to take parties outside government into account because their preferences also shape policy in parliamentary democracies. We show that a measure of parliamentary partisanship based on the preferences and bargaining power shares of all legislative parties outperforms the more traditional measure of government partisanship in explaining policy outcomes. In particular, we find that this is the case for public social spending and political decentralization

Sistema político español

Sistema político españolJosep Mª Reníu (ed.), Barcelona: Huygens Editorial, 2012, 395 pp

Show me your friends: a survey experiment on the effect of coalition signals

Recent studies of coalition-directed voting suggest that what political parties say during a campaign can influence voter perceptions of the likelihood of certain coalitions and that this, in turn, may foster strategic voting in multiparty systems. Here, we expand this argument, and show that pre-election coalition signals also have the potential to influence voter perceptions of the parties themselves. By revealing their coalition preferences, parties provide information on where they stand on the political continuum. We test our argument using a survey experiment run during a regional election campaign in Spain in which we manipulated the coalition signals emitted by two parties: one, a traditional, social-democratic party and, the second, a new, liberal party. Results show how coalition signals can significantly influence the party's position and, ultimately, affect voters' stated probability of voting, especially in the case of the recently founded party

Unexpected event during surveys design: promise and pitfalls for causal inference

An increasing number of studies exploit the occurrence of unexpected events during the fieldwork of public opinion surveys to estimate causal effects. In this paper we discuss the use of this identification strategy based on unforeseen and salient events that split the sample of respondents into treatment and control groups: the Unexpected Event during Surveys Design (UESD). In particular we focus on the assumptions under which unexpected events can be exploited to estimate causal effects and we discuss potential threats to identification, paying especial attention to the observable and testable implications of these assumptions. We propose a series of best practices in the form of various estimation strategies and robustness checks that can be used to lend credibility to the causal estimates. Drawing on data from the European Social Survey we illustrate the discussion of this method with an original study of the impact of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks (Paris, 01/07/2015) on French citizens' satisfaction with their national governmen