A multilevel model for coalition governments: Uncovering dependencies within and across governments due to parties

Abstract

In this paper, I propose a new statistical method to represent the complex multilevel structure of coalition government data. The method opens up opportunities to model and test theories on the interplay of agents in their collective impact on entities, which bears the potential to advance our understanding of other research areas characterized by interdependence structures, such as multi-party wars, treaties, and international organizations. I model the interdependence structure by endogenizing the weights of a multiple membership multilevel model (MMMM). This approach allows for a flexible weighting of coalition parties in their effect on governments conditional on the interdependencies among them. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time that the weights of an MMMM have been endogenized. With this paper, I provide the R package ‘Rmm’ to estimate such models for a variety of outcomes (linear, logit, conditional logit, Cox, Weibull) in a user-friendly way.