Pre-electoral coalitions in comparative perspective: A test of existing hypotheses

Stimmensplitting und Koalitionswahl

“…1986: 276) Die in Tabelle 1 zusammengefassten Ergebnisse der Inhaltsanalyse zeigen zunächst, dass bis 1961 keine Koalitionsmöglichkeiten im SPIEGEL vor der jeweiligen Wahl diskutiert wurden. Das stimmt gut mit den Ergebnissen von Golder (2002: 3) überein, die für die westeuropäischen parlamentarischen Demokratien insgesamt erst ab Mitte der 60er Jahre ein stärkeres Ansteigen von Vorwahlkoalitionen nachweist. Von einer Vorwahlkoalition spricht sie, wenn die an ihr beteiligten Parteien klar und öffentlich ihren Willen vor der Wahl bekundet haben, dass sie nach der Wahl in einer Regierung zusammen arbeiten werden, wenn sie die nötige Mehrheit der Sitze erreichen würden (Golder 2002: 20 Mit der erwarteten Knappheit des Erststimmenrennens und der Klarheit der Koalitionslage haben wir zwei Kontexteffekte formuliert, die systematisch mit der Häufigkeit einer Koalitionswahl zusammenhängen.…”

Weighting Parties and Coalitions: How Coalition Signals Influence Voting Behavior

“…Empirically, preelectoral coalitions and preelectoral coordination are fairly common among parties during campaigns (Golder 2005(Golder , 2006. Very common are joint campaign events or press conference in which the respective party leaders appear side by side.…”

“…In practice, coalition signals can offer crucial information to voters (Gschwend, Stoetzer, and Zittlau 2016). As one preelectoral coalition strategy (Golder 2005(Golder , 2006, coalition signals may provide guidance about which coalition governments are conceivable politically and likely to gain a majority in parliament. They reduce the number of theoretically possible coalitions to a manageable range and help citizens to form clearer expectations about the government formation process after the election.…”

Corruption and power in democracies

“…Such commitments are quite common: for example, Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats shared power after the 1997 and 2002 Irish elections, having run on a joint platform in 2002; 28 and a center-left coalition won the 2006 Italian election after running together as The Union. 29 Golder (2005) reports that about a quarter of pre-election coalitions in her sample of 23 countries between 1946 and 2002 went on to form a government; while more than a third of the coalition governments in Strom and Muller's (1999) sample were based on pre-electoral agreements. 30 Parties usually claim that their precommitments allow citizens to predict their behavior in negotiations to form a government.…”

“…30 Parties usually claim that their precommitments allow citizens to predict their behavior in negotiations to form a government. Golder (2005) suggests that a coalition may secure more votes from risk-averse citizens who cannot anticipate the coalition which will form in a hung parliament, or that a coalition may obtain more seats for a given number of votes. Neither of these arguments work in our model: in particular, the equilibrium-based solution concept precludes any strategic uncertainty.…”