Opposition coalitions under electoral authoritarianism can boost opposition vote share and sometimes threaten regimes. This research asks whether coalitions also create risks: when a coalition performs strongly but fails to win power, does that paradoxically accelerate autocratization?
* The Question:* Does supporting a minority cabinet hurt a party’s electoral prospects? Existing work suggests support parties can influence policy while avoiding the electoral costs of joining government. This argument is qualified: it holds only for support parties without written, formal agreements because informal support is less visible to voters.
The choices party leaders make about forming electoral coalitions shape the alternatives voters face. Existing knowledge is limited about the tradeoffs coalitions impose on potential partners, how coalitions change the strategic responses of competing parties, and their net effect on election outcomes.
Introduction: You've seen it countless times—candidates make promises during elections, but not all follow through. This article explores why some parties are more reliable than others when keeping their election commitments.
Interest groups that represent marginalized populations (women, people of color, Native nations, and the poor) often claim to champion their most vulnerable constituents but regularly neglect those facing intersectional disadvantage.
Coalition governments can be confusing for citizens trying to understand who is responsible for policy outcomes. This article explores how voters overcome this challenge.
Political parties across the EU have formed more grand coalitions over the last two decades, including in countries with no prior experience of such alliances. At the same time, new and radical parties have surged, signaling growing fragmentation in European politics. This study investigates how mainstream and new parties fare electorally when they enter or leave grand coalitions.
Environmental policy stringency in nine European countries (1990-2012) hinges on green parties' expected inclusion probabilities, not polling data for governing parties. Changes in these probability forecasts significantly predict shifts in environmental policies of sitting governments. This finding underscores that parties outside government can exert substantial influence through their perceived coalition potential.
Experimental work shows that decision makers with proposal power are often held responsible for collective decisions. Building on that insight, extensive cross-national survey data from 1988–2010 across 28 democracies was used to trace how voters assign responsibility for economic outcomes in coalition governments.
What this note addresses: The allocation of ministerial portfolios shapes governability in Brazilian presidentialism. Objective measures of ministry relevance can clarify executive–legislative relations by showing which ministries matter most in coalition bargaining between presidents and political parties.
This paper explores how parties entering coalition governments influence voter views. Voter perceptions change only if the party joins an unexpected coalition. We test this claim using three methods: cross-country analysis in five European countries, individual panel data, and quasi-experimental testing. Our findings show that parties' reputation shifts when they enter coalitions not aligned with voters' expectations.
A dynamic Bayesian forecasting model is introduced that explicitly combines published pre-election public-opinion polls with information from fundamentals-based forecasting models. The approach is built for multiparty systems and is structured to produce probabilistic statements about election-relevant quantities beyond simple vote shares.
This article investigates why Brazilian presidents vary in their ability to pass legislation across administrations and within individual terms. The analysis focuses on the Cardoso, Lula, and Rousseff governments and tests how institutional prerogatives, exclusive policy domains, and political-context factors affect presidential legislative success.
Presidents in presidential systems routinely use cabinet appointments to build and manage governing coalitions when they lack a legislative majority. Not all coalitions are equal: some are oversized—larger than strictly necessary—and therefore more vulnerable to agency and coordination problems. Existing literature offers several explanations for coalition size, but few tests are systematic and none focus squarely on why surplus (oversized) coalitions form.
The formation of the “yellow‑green” Conte I government—an unexpected coalition between the Five Star Movement and the League after Italy’s 4 March 2018 election—appeared puzzling because the partners seemed far apart on the conventional left–right scale. This article shows that the puzzle arises from relying on a unidimensional left–right representation of party positions and resolves it by introducing a second policy dimension.
This essay develops a theory of strategic legislative agenda control showing that a single party can effectively set the agenda under majoritarian gatekeeping rules without holding a majority—or even a plurality—of seats. The agenda-setting party need not be the median party in the assembly and does not require support from executive-led parliamentary coalitions to do so.
This study compares how leaders build winning coalitions in small versus large groups.
This research note analyzes the results of Brazil's 2014 elections with a focus on the National Congress and on claims and predictions about the country's political future. Attention centers on how electoral agreements and alliances translate into the post-election configuration of Congress and on what that means for governability under Brazilian presidentialism.
This study examines how institutional context shapes voting in legislatures.
This paper examines the evolution of the institutional presidency — the cluster of agencies that directly support the chief executive — in Argentina and Brazil since redemocratization in the 1980s. The central question is what explains changes in the size of the institutional presidency and the types of agencies that compose it.