This article investigates how the degree of electoral competition affects parties' policy positions. It follows a growing body of research on party positioning in multiparty competition that regards elections as signals for parties that have to choose their positions and issue strategies. In this article we argue that previous elections provide information about the competitiveness of the upcoming election. The expected degree of electoral competition affects parties' future policy positions since with increasing competitiveness of an election, parties have higher incentives to move toward a vote-maximizing position. However, what constitutes a vote-maximizing strategy varies between parties. While large mainstream parties have an incentive to moderate their positions, small and niche parties choose more extreme positions to distinguish themselves from their mainstream competitors. Applying a novel measure of electoral competitiveness, we find that the degree of electoral competition indeed determines parties' policy shifts, but that this effect is moderated by party size. AbstractThis paper investigates how the degree of electoral competition affects parties'

Government formation in multiparty systems is of self-evident substantive importance, and the subject of an enormous theoretical literature. Empirical evaluations of models of government formation tend to separate government formation per se, from the distribution of key government payoffs such as cabinet portfolios between members of the government that forms. Models of government formation are necessarily specified ex ante, absent any knowledge of the government that forms. Models of the distribution of cabinet portfolios are typically, though not necessarily, specified ex post, given knowledge of the identity of some government "formateur" or even of the full partisan composition of the eventual cabinet. This disjunction lies at the heart of a notorious contradiction between predictions of the distribution of cabinet portfolios made by canonical models of legislative bargaining, and the robust empirical regularity of proportional portfolio allocations -"Gamson's Law". We resolve this contradiction by specifying and estimating a joint model of cabinet formation and portfolio distribution, which for example predicts ex ante which parties will receive zero portfolios rather than taking this as given ex post.We conclude that canonical models of legislative bargaining do add to our ability to predict government membership, but that portfolio distribution between government members conforms robustly to a proportionality norm … we suggest because portfolio distribution follows the much more difficult process of policy bargaining in the typical government formation process.Cabinet formation and portfolio distribution in European multi-party systems / 2

Policy in coalition governments (a) depends on negotiations between parties that (b) continue between elections. No extant means of predicting policy—bargaining power indices, vote shares, seat shares, polling, veto players or measures of electoral competitiveness—recognizes both of these facts. We conceptualize, estimate and validate the first dynamic measure of parties’ bargaining leverage intended to predict policy and politics. We argue that those parties with the greatest leverage in policy negotiations are those with the highest probability of participating in an alternative government, were one to form. Combining a large set of political polls and an empirical coalition formation model developed with out-of-sample testing, we estimate coalition inclusion probabilities for parties in a sample of 21 parliamentary democracies at a monthly frequency over four decades. Applications to government spending and to the stringency of environmental policy show leverage from coalition inclusion probabilities to be strongly predictive while the primary alternatives—vote shares, seat shares and polls—are not.

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