When to Coalesce: Early versus Late CoalitionAnnouncement in an Experimental Democracy

In multi-party democracies, several parties usually have to join together in coalitionto form government. Many aspects of that process have been fairly fully investigated,others less so. Among the latter is the timing of the formation and announcement ofcoalitions.1While the dominant popular image may be one of parties meeting togetherafter the election to hammer out a coalition agreement, pre-election coalitions of onesort or another are actually quite common. In almost half of the elections in OECDcountries since World War II, at least one pair of parties had pre-announced theirintention to join together in government. A quarter of governments formed werebased wholly (and another quarter in part) on pre-election agreements.2To date, such studies as there have been of pre-election coalitions haveconcentrated primarily on system-level explanations – features of the electoral system(majoritarian or proportional, and so on) that make such arrangements more or lesslikely.3 Here we shall instead look more at the agent-level logic of ‘early’ (pre-election)versus ‘late’ (post-election) coalition formation, from the point of view ofvoters and parties.