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Bargaining Theory and Portfolio Payoffs in European Coalition Governments 1945–83

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Norman Schofield  and
Michael Laver
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Extract

Coalition formation has been the subject of much theoretical and empirical work in the past decade or so. The theories that have been tested all rest, one way or another, upon assumptions about the ways in which the payoff accruing to a particular coalition is distributed among its members. Yet much less empirical work has been done on the process of payoff distribution. Thus some of the fundamental assumptions of coalition theories, at least in terms of their practical application to coalition governments, have been more scantily tested. Several theories of payoff distribution have been recently developed, however. It is the purpose of this article to test the application of these theories to the practice of coalition government in Europe.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , April 1985 , pp. 143 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

1 See, for example, Leiserson, M., ‘Coalitions in Politics’ (doctoral dissertation, Yale University, 1966)Google Scholar; and Leiserson, M., ‘Factions and Coalitions in One Party Japan: An Interpretation Based on the Theory of Games’, American Political Science Review, LXII (1968), 770–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dodd, L. C., ‘Party Coalitions in Multiparty Parliaments: A Game Theoretic Analysis’, American Political Science Review, LXVIII (1974), 1083–117Google Scholar; and also Dodd, L. C., Coalitions in Parliamentary Governments (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

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3 Browne, E. C. and Feste, K. A., ‘Qualitative Dimensions of Coalition Payoffs: Evidence from European Governments, 1945–70’, American Behavioral Scientist, XVIII (1975), 530–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Grofman, B., ‘Applications of a Dynamic Model of Protocoalition Formation to European Cabinet Coalitions in Three Countries’Google Scholar (mimeograph, University of California at Irvine, 1981); and Grofman, B., ‘A Dynamic Model of Protocoalition Formation in Ideological N-Space’, Behavioral Science, XXVII (1982), 77–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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8 See, for example, Browne, E. C., ‘Testing Theories of Coalition Formation in the European Context’, Comparative Political Studies, III (1971), 391–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Taylor, M. and Laver, M., ‘Government Coalitions in Western Europe’, European Journal of Political Research, 1 (1973), 205–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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11 In a later analysis of the data Browne and Frendeis verified that this phenomenon was not purely an artefact of the lumpiness of the data. See Browne, E. C. and Frendeis, J. P., ‘An Assessment of the Evidence from Cabinet Coalition Situations’, American Journal of Political Science, XXIV (1980), 753–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Schofield, N., ‘The Kernel and Payoffs in European Government Coalitions’, Public Choice, XXVI (1976), 29–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 For a fuller discussion of these bargaining notions, see Schofield, N., ‘Generalised Bargaining Sets for Cooperative Games’, International Journal of Game Theory, VII (1978), 183–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 See Schofield, N., ‘Bargaining Set Theory and Stability in Coalition Governments’, Mathematical Social Science, III (1982), 9–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for further details of the methods involved in computing the bargaining set.

15 In comparing our results with those of Browne and Franklin, of course, account must be taken of the fact that they predict proportion, while we predict numbers, of cabinet seats. This should not affect the slopes much, but our constant of about one portfolio reflects, given a mean cabinet size of about twenty portfolios, a proportionate constant of about 0·05.

16 We also verified that this systematic misprediction was not purely a result of the lumpy nature of the dependent variable.

17 See Schofield, N., ‘The Relationship Between Voting and Party Strength in an Electoral System’, in Holler, M., ed., Power, Voting and Voting Power (Wurzburg: Physica Verlag, 1981).Google Scholar

18 See, for example, Schofield, N., ‘Social Equilibrium and Cycles on Compact Sets’, Journal of Economic Theory, XXXIII (1984), 59–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 See Schofield, , ‘Generic Instability of Majority Rule’Google Scholar, for a formal proof.