Gamson’s Law of office distribution tells us approximately how many ministries each member of a coalition will receive. However, the question of which ministries are allocated to which parties according to a more general party motivation remains largely open. In a model-theoretic investigation of portfolio allocation we focus on the characteristics of the distributional process concerning the qualitative differences of ministries: which motivation drives parties to choose or disregard certain ministries? Applying the technical framework of divisor methods for our model and estimating party preferences according to their election manifestos, we find that substance indeed does matter. Parties seek to obtain ministries in those policy fields which they mention more intensively in their electoral manifestos and at the same time spread their ministerial control broadly. Furthermore, we find that bigger parties are not qualitatively repaid for their usually observable quantitative loss.
In diesem Aufsatz entwickle ich -aufbauend auf Riker/Ordeshook (1968) -ein erweitertes Kalkül für rationales Wählen, das für Mehrparteiensysteme geeignet ist, weil es den Koalitionsbildungsprozess sowie den legislativen Prozess antizipiert (vgl. Austen-Smith/Banks 1988). Ich betrachte Koalitionen und damit verbundene legislative Ergebnisse anstatt Parteien und kann daher zum einen Präferenzprofile von Wählern über bestimmte Koalitionen bilden und zum anderen die Wahrscheinlichkeiten der Bildung einzelner Koalitionen anhand von prognostizierten Wahlergebnissen in Verbindung mit Koalitionssignalen der Parteien abschätzen. Am Beispiel der Bundestagswahl 2005 erstelle ich eine "politische Landkarte", die die Wähler in Abhängigkeit von ihrer politischen Position im Politikraum hinsichtlich ihres rationalen Kalküls gruppiert. Ferner können anhand dieses Kalküls Aussagen darüber getroffen werden, wie Parteien im Wahlkampf durch verschiedene Koalitionssignale ihre Stimmen maximieren können. Schlagwörter: Koalitionen, rationale Wahl, Bundestagswahl 1. Einleitung
A B S T R A C TIn this article, we analyze the policy and office motivations of parties in coalition-formation processes at the German federal-state level. We utilize a model developed by Sened that considers both motivations simultaneously and introduces a method by which to estimate its key parameters using data of German state-level coalition-formations.
This article extends the calculus of rational voting (Riker & Ordeshook, 1968) by considering the coalition building process and the legislative process (cf. Austen-Smith & Banks, 1988) in multi-party systems. Comparing preferences on coalitions and their resulting legislative outcomes instead of party preferences, I create preference profiles of voters on coalitions and estimate the probability that a coalition forms, given the parties' coalition signals, and an expected electoral result. I illustrate the results of this rational calculus for the German Bundestag elections 2005 as a political map. Furthermore, this calculus allows the identification of coalition signals which raise and reduce a party's vote share.
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