Abstract
The German party system has experienced considerable changes in the past years. A decline of the two larger parties CDU/CSU and SPD, the rise of the smaller parties, and the entrance of new parties into parliament cause a significant increase of party system fragmentation. This trend affects well-established routines of government formation, since traditional two-party camp coalitions fail to gain majorities oftentimes. We argue that the most common reaction to such missing majorities, the formation of a so-called grand coalition between the two largest parties, is problematic as a permanent solution. To give advice how alternatives can succeed, we compare coalitions on the German state level and search for factors which favour the formation of such alternative coalition models. Our results indicate that the smaller parties are most crucial and that, besides standard office and policy factors, also questions of relative strength play a role.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Here and in the following, we refer to the situation as at January 2021.
- 3.
See Sect. 2 for conceptual clarity about this term.
- 4.
Berlin, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia.
- 5.
To avoid confusion with different party names, we refer to the PDS also as ‘The Left’, also when we write about the time before 2007.
- 6.
On the Länder level, we find more than three options, for example when we include regional parties. As these are exceptional cases and we are interested in general patterns, we skip these cases in our discussion. Further, we are not interested in three-party coalitions of CDU, SPD and Greens, which have been built only in cases where CDU and SPD are not the strongest parties.
- 7.
One of our Reviewers hinted to the point that it is nothing unusual that governing parties are losing votes after elections. This is absolutely right. To account for this argument, we compared average losses after grand coalitions and classical coalitions in the Länder level since 1990. Average losses indeed also occurred after classical coalitions but were considerably smaller (−1.8% points) than after grand coalitions (−2.8% points).
- 8.
Further, parties aim at reducing the number of coalition parties in order to avoid bargaining costs (Leiserson 1968). As the number of parties is largely constant for our setup (two parties in grand coalitions, three parties for most of the alternatives under research), we omit a further discussion of this variable.
- 9.
Table 3 does not include the government formations in Saxony 2004 and 2014, Thuringia 2014 and Hesse 2018, since in these four cases, CDU and SPD were not the strongest parties.
- 10.
The larger party can be better off regarding its office (i) or policy utility (ii), it can be the strongest party in parliament (iii) and have increased its vote share (iv). Also up to two smaller parties can have higher vote shares than in the election before (v, vi), and they can be quite safe about the legal threshold (vii, viii). Finally, the camp-changing party can be stronger than the other small coalition party (ix). For single cases, the maximum can be smaller, for example for black-green coalitions in which only one smaller party is member.
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Linhart, E., Switek, N. (2022). Escaping the Vicious Circle: New Coalition Forms as Alternatives to CDU-SPD Grand Coalitions in the German Länder. In: Sauermann, J., Tepe, M., Debus, M. (eds) Jahrbuch für Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie. Jahrbuch für Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35878-5_3
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