Why Such a Quick Coalition Formation?
I agree with Matt Yglesias that it is pretty amazing how quickly the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives were able to form a coalition government. This is not just so in comparison to the United States but also in comparative terms. In the countries that I know best, coalition formation takes weeks if not months and tends to produce long documents in which the terms of the coalition agreement are laid out in painstaking detail. By contrast, the British coalition seems based on a pretty loose set of principles and was negotiated in a similarly ad hoc manner (if you haven’t seen it yet, check out the Guardian’s analysis of a photograph taken of Nick Clegg’s negotiation notes).
It turns out that there is interesting crossnational variation in how long coalition formation takes. Lanny Martin and Georg Vanberg (gated) report in an article in the British Journal of Political Science that Danish and Swedish coalitions generally form within a week after the elections. In Austria, Belgium, and Italy it takes over a month and in the Netherlands even three months before a new government is formed. They show some evidence that bargaining takes longer as there are more parties involved and as the ideological distance between the parties is relatively large. Both these factors would have pointed to a relatively long process in the British context. In a different paper, Daniel Diermeier and Peter van Roozendaal show (gated) that negotiations that can begin immediately after the elections and that are held after a government defeat should last longer. Again, the British case would appear to be an outlier here.
One possibility is that this literature hasn’t looked sufficiently at institutional differences, such as the absence of a formal majority investiture vote in parliament, as well as different rules and norms that govern the coalition formation process. For example, in some countries a head of state first appoints an informateur who seeks to identify a likely coalition of parties that agree on some basic principles. After this a formateur is appointed who negotiates the details of a government agreement exclusively with the identified potential coalition partners. (There are also some countries where coalitions routinely form prior to elections, which should speed up post election bargaining).
Perhaps past experience also plays a role. If you have once been burned by failing to negotiate the terms to a government agreement, you may want to insist on clearer terms the next time around. Remember, it has been a long time since there has been a coalition government in Britain. Given the many difficult decisions the government faces, not in the least on how to balance the budget, one needs not go out on a limb to predict that there will soon be important issues on the table that the coalition partners have not yet bargained about. It would seem equally unadventurous to predict that this government will not last five years.
Comments
the speed of this government formation is truly amazing. typically, coalition agreements have become very detailed and comprehensive during the last decades. consider the german coalition (similarly made up of a conservative and a liberal party): it took the two parties (who declared in advance to form a coalition in case they held a majority after the election) a full month to hammer out an agreement of no less than 133 pages.
it might be the lack of experience with coalitions in the uk, but there seems to be a lot of trust between the two parties to come to terms in such a short time without putting every little detail down to paper (which is impossible in five days i believe).
it’ll be really exciting to see what mechanisms of conflict resolution the two parties will adopt once they start to fight over the nitty-gritty of implementing the policies they now agreed on.
Posted by: Laurenz Ennser | May 12, 2010 10:44 AM
I don’t understand what is the relevant object of comparison in the US. Aren’t the coalitions in the United States the parties and they are permanent.
Or is it just the time between the elections in November and swearing in the new officials in January?
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May 12, 2010 01:54 PM
comparison is necessarily limited here since government coalitions are only found in parliamentary systems whereas the us constitutes the proto-type presidential system.
i believe the term coalition is used in terms of voter coalitions or legislative coalitions in the us context but i’m no expert on that …
Posted by: laurenz_e | May 12, 2010 05:09 PM
A more recent paper on this topic than those mentioned in the original post is:
Sona Golder. 2010. “Bargaining Delays in the Government Formation Process”
Comparative Political Studies: 3-32.
This paper argues that delays are caused by the interaction of uncertainty and bargaining complexity. Uncertainty refers to the extent to which parties are unsure about what offer of policy and office other parties will find acceptable and bargaining complexity essentially refers to how hard it is to find out the information that parties are uncertain about. Things like the effective number of parties in the legislature and policy polarization increase bargaining complexity.
It seems to me that this helps to explain why the British government formation process was (relatively) quicker than how long it takes in other European countries. For a start, there is a new cabinet office document indicating how the civil service should, in the weeks leading up to an election, figure out areas of policy agreement between different parties so that they can help in any post-election coalition formation activities. As a result, the British civil service would already be in a position to reduce much of the uncertainty surrounding the coalition government formation process.
Moreover, the weeks leading up to the election clearly indicated that a hung parliament was increasingly likely and the set of plausible governments was quite small. As a result, many of the parties that might form these coalitions would have already been thinking about coalition negotiations (even if they said that they weren’t) and the concessions that would be necessary to reach an agreement before the election. This would have resulted in a faster post-election bargaining process due to reduced uncertainty.
Not only was there less uncertainty in the UK than in many European countries after an election, but the bargaining environment is less complex. The effective number of parties in the legislature (though higher than has historically been the case) is still low relative to most other European legislatures and the degree of policy polarization is also quite small.
As a result, I’m not particularly surprised that the UK government formation process took less time than the average 24 days or so it takes in West European countries.
For another recent paper on delays in the government formation process see Dumont and DeWinter (2008) in the third edited volume of the book series on parliamentary governments by Bergman, Muller, and Strom. The first edited volume in this series actually has a lot of information about the institutional structure that surrounds the government formation process in individual West European countries.
Data on delays in the government formation process in Eastern Europe is now available from
Sona Golder and Courtenay Ryals Conrad. 2010. “Measuring Government Duration and Stability in Central Eastern European Democracies.”
European Journal of Political Research: 119-150.
Posted by: Matt G | May 17, 2010 08:38 AM