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The Missing Piece: Introducing the 4th Generation of Coalition Theories

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Coalition Politics and Federalism

Abstract

In political science, coalition theories, mostly applied to the study of governments, have developed during the past decades into a huge body of literature to provide theoretical knowledge and tools for the analysis of formation, maintenance and breakdown of this type of government. In fact, one could say that coalition theories today constitute one of the most prolific fields of academic literature on political science.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As the legislator belonging to the party median situated at the middle of the ideological spectrum.

  2. 2.

    The one who is in charge of “forming” a coalition.

  3. 3.

    Would talk about informal institutions.

  4. 4.

    Like the attribution of a “numerical” value for each portfolio in function of its “relevance” in order to identify a “qualitative” distribution of portfolios. This apparently ingenious idea reveals itself as quite useless in practice because it is very limited in time and extension. Indeed, depending on the location and the time, some ministries can be very significantly different. For instance, the ministry of ecology in France has greater importance today than a decade ago, but has no relevance at all in Argentina. On the other hand, the Ministry of Mining has great relevance in Chile but does not even exist in Ireland.

  5. 5.

    These findings also contradicted the theory that proposes the inability to govern in parliamentary regimes without having a majority.

  6. 6.

    See inter alia the works by Budge and Laver (1993), Laver and Shepsle (1998), Martin and Stevenson (2001), Altman (2000), Amorim Neto (1988), Martínez-Gallardo (2012)…

  7. 7.

    European democracies faced many recent cases of incapacity in predicting a clear winner after an election, deriving in the formation of an unpredicted cabinet coalition. See the example of Belgium in 2011–2012, where negotiations lasted almost a year and a half, during which the country had no formal government. This difficulty in forming a government, as happened recently again in Belgium (2015), but also in UK (2010 and 2017), Ireland (2016), Spain (2016), Italy (2013), Greece (2014–2015), or Germany (2017) and the later composition of these governments, raises the question of the responsiveness of these governments. In 2010, for instance, would a LibDem voter have been pleased to see his party forming a Conservative-led government?

  8. 8.

    See the chapter by Sandes de Freitas and Bizarro-Neto in this volume.

  9. 9.

    For instance, see how the LibDems were electorally rewarded for participating in the first Cameron cabinet.

  10. 10.

    See the chapter by Giannetti and Pinto.

  11. 11.

    That is, the most voted list elects two senators and second most voted list elects one.

  12. 12.

    Stefuriuc (2013) limited her work to two countries (Germany and Spain) and the work of Bäck et al. (2013) covers eight countries (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, The Netherlands, the UK, Spain and Sweden), of which half are ruled by low levels of shared-rules or self-rules.

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  1. Instituto de Ciências Políticas (IPOL), University of Brasilia (UnB), Brasilia, Brazil

    Adrián Albala

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  1. Instituto de Ciências Políticas (IPOL), University of Brasilia (UnB), Brasilia, Brazil

    Adrián Albala

  2. University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Josep Maria Reniu

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Albala, A. (2018). The Missing Piece: Introducing the 4th Generation of Coalition Theories. In: Albala, A., Reniu, J. (eds) Coalition Politics and Federalism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75100-9_2

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