ABSTRACT
In most parliamentary democracies, single parties rarely obtain a majority of seats in parliamentary elections so that attaining the control of the executive branch necessitates the formation – mostly explicit – of a coalition of parties possessing a majority of seats in the legislature. The study of the formation and termination of such coalitions is a major field of interest in comparative politics. Almost all of these theories start with the assumption of parties as unitary actors seeking office (Riker 1962; Peleg 1981) or policy gains (De Swaan 1973; Laver and Shepsle 1990a) or a mixture of the two (Austen-Smith and Banks 1988; Sened 1995, 1996). Yet inquiries into coalition politics began with a focus on the ‘partisan composition’ of coalition governments, whether as the explanandum (formation) or explanans (termination), and have somehow marginalized other questions such as what these collective actors intend to do, what they expect to do, what they actually do and how these government policies come about (Strøm and Müller 1999). More recent studies have begun to examine these issues in more detail (Austin-Smith and Banks 1990; Laver and Shepsle 1996; Mitchell 1996; Timmermans 1998, 2006; Müller and Strøm 2000).
