The composition of governing coalitions does not always reflect the relative sizes of the coalition members, but research has not been able to fully reconcile why. We propose that political parties with more (re-elected) incumbent representatives fare better in coalitional bargaining. To...

The increasing electoral success of populist radical-right parties poses a significant challenge to established political parties in Western democracies. While mainstream parties often maintain a policy of non-cooperation with these newcomers, such cordon sanitaire strategies can become...

This paper analyzes empirically the coalition formation of local governments. We introduce a novel econometric strategy involving choice based sampling from a spatial network to allow for multi-partner mergers in our empirical analysis. We apply our method to recent municipality mergers in...