Abstract
In this article, we use a new data set describing governments, political parties and institutions to make an explicit comparison between Western Europe (WE) and Central Eastern Europe (CEE) in the investigation of three different topical issues found in the coalition literature, namely, coalition formation (that is, which factors affect who forms the winning coalitions), the number of cabinet members (that is, what affects the number of ministers in a cabinet) and cabinet duration (that is, which factors affect how long a new government lasts). Our findings indicate that, regardless of all the discussions about how CEE is different from WE because of the post-communist heritage or the volatility of voters in the CEE region, structural attributes such as the size and number of political parties are important determinants of coalition formation and cabinet duration patterns in both the West and the East. In fact, precisely because of the unsettled nature of CEE party politics, structural attributes tend to matter even more in the East.
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Notes
The countries included in the study are the member states of the European Union, excluding Cyprus and Malta, but including two additional non-EU member states, Iceland and Norway. That is, the West European countries included are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The CEE members included in the study are Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. In accordance with the practice used by Blondel et al (2007), we prefer the term Central Eastern Europe (CEE) over the more traditional ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ for the 10 new democracies that we include in this study.
The data set also includes data on Cyprus and Malta, but we have omitted these two countries from the West–East comparison that is the focus of this article.
In this article, we use ‘government’ and ‘cabinet’ interchangeably, but the formal unit of analysis is the cabinet. There is a new cabinet every time there is a change in any of the following three criteria: (i) party composition, (ii) change in prime minster and (iii) at every general election (Müller and Strøm, 2000). For a discussion of alternative definitions, see Damgaard (1994).
Some very useful information on intra-cabinet politics is, of course, available (Blondel et al, 2007), but what we refer to here is the general lacunae of systematic information about the coalition governance variables included in the book by Strøm et al (2008). We are, however, working on such a project (www.erdda.se).
In the case of coalition formation, we only look at cases in which there was no single majority party, which gives us information from 233 cabinets. Non-partisan caretaker cabinets are excluded in the total cabinet count. Of the total number of cabinets, there were 210 cabinets for which we had enough information to analyse the formation of the coalition cabinet. For the second analysis, on the number of ministers, we have data on 273 cabinets, and in the final analysis we have data on up to 237 cabinets. For the duration analysis, we have information on up to 207 cabinets (that had ended in 2010 or earlier). Also note that in the duration analysis, we use the absolute duration (in days), rather than the relative duration, but for illustrational purposes both measurements of duration are shown in Table 1.
In the respective models, we include variables that the literature often claims are important and that the analysis of WE by Strøm et al (2008) found to be important (or unexpectedly unimportant).
In an interesting development, Tavits and Letki (2009) argued that the real problem for understanding left–right politics in the CEE region is not actually the placement of the parties on the left–right scale; rather, what is uncommon and somewhat new is that the parties on the left pursue the traditional policies of the right (for example, market reform and fiscal austerity) more markedly than do the right parties themselves (see also Marks and Steenbergen, 2004).
In our sample of countries, at the time of the last recorded cabinet, the countries with positive parliamentarism are all the 10 CEE countries plus Belgium, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg and Spain.
In our sample of countries, at the time of the last recorded cabinet, the countries with semi-presidentialism are France, Lithuania and Poland.
In our sample of countries, at the time of the last recorded cabinet, the countries with bicameralism are Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania and Slovenia.
Note, however, Strøm et al (2008) used a measure of PM powers that was based on a larger set of seven indicators.
Collinear, or nearly collinear, predictors are themselves not a problem, as they are, from a statistical point of view, correctly correlated with each other. However, as the sample size needs be fairly large to be able to produce precise estimates when having nearly collinear variables, we remove collinear predictors in some of our models. Please note that this may be problematic as we may instead introduce omitted variable bias, when removing potentially important predictors.
The correlations between the variables ‘largest party seat share’ and ‘bargaining power of the largest party’ in CEE and the variables ‘bargaining power of the largest party’ and ‘median party bargaining power’ in WE are high (about 0.9). This does constitute a problem in the analysis as the sample sizes are fairly small. Removing one of these highly correlated variables from the analysis makes the remaining predictor substantially significant (not shown here).
Because the largest party and the median-legislator party are often the same parties (especially in WE), this result is not completely robust. If we remove the predictors that measure the dominance of a large party, the influence of the median party is highly significant (not shown here).
With regard to semi-presidentialism, two sources of the difference between our results and the ones generated by Schleiter and Morgan-Jones (2009), who found a strong impact of semi-presidentialism, can be that they use a very inclusive definition, encompassing all countries with directly elected presidents. In contrast, we use a stricter one which demands that elected presidents must also be able to directly influence the government formation process.
As we noted above, in WE, the countries are roughly evenly split within this variable, that is, about half have a negative form of parliamentarism.
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the support of The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (dnr A050-10) and The Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation (MMW 2011.0030) that made this research possible. Earlier versions of this article have been presented at the workshop Party Government and Parliamentary Democracy in the New Europe, the ECPR Joint Sessions, Lisbon, 14–19 April 2009 and at the conference on Party Government in the New EU, December 2010 in Lüneburg, Germany. Both workshops were hosted by Professors Hans Keman and Ferdinand Müller-Rommel. We thank the participants, and in particular the hosts, for many valuable comments. We also thank the anonymous reviewers of this journal.
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Bergman, T., Ersson, S. & Hellström, J. Government formation and breakdown in Western and Central Eastern Europe. Comp Eur Polit 13, 345–375 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2013.27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2013.27