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Party Competition and Government Formation in Multilevel Settings: Evidence from Germany1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Marc Debus
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Abstract

Governing in multilevel settings has become a prominent research field in comparative political science. This article asks if German state parties adopt similar ideological positions and coalition strategies to the parties on the federal stage. The results of a content analysis of state and federal election manifestos show that German political parties on the state level indeed adopt different programmatic positions to the federal parties'. Government formation on the state level, however, is not only influenced by the state parties' programmatic viewpoints, but also by the predominant patterns of coalition politics at the federal level.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , 2008 , pp. 505 - 538
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2008.

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Footnotes

1

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the First ECPR Graduate Conference, Colchester, UK, 7–9 September 2006. Grant support is gratefully acknowledged from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (BR1851/3-2/3). I would like to thank Martin Brunner, Jochen Müller, the ECPR panel participants and the referees for their valuable comments.

References

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51 The conditional logit model assumes the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA). That is, ‘the odds of choosing one alternative over another do not depend on any other alternatives in the choice set or on the values of the covariates associated with those alternatives’ (Martin and Stevenson, ‘Government Formation in Parliamentary Democracies’, p. 39). I check whether the IIA assumption is violated by applying the test procedure developed by Martin and Stevenson. The IIA assumption is violated if the IIA-test value given in Table 3 is lower than 0.05. This is not the case in the regression model presented here, so that the IIA assumption is not problematic in the following applications.Google Scholar

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