Theorie und Empirie der Vergleichenden Koalitionsforschung: Stand und Ausblick

Governing in multi-party cabinets has become the standard in modern democracies. Therefore, it is not surprising that research in comparative politics increasingly focusses on the analysis of the processes of government formation, coalition governance, and breaking of coalition governments. In this literature review, we first present the state of research on coalition governments by looking at current developments in coalition theory. We then examine the findings in the domains of coalition politics, which have gained considerable attention in recent years. These domains include the effects of institutional characteristics of political systems such as the existence and the configuration of multi-level systems and the competences of parliaments particularly in the context of the investiture of a new government. Moreover, recent research has focussed on the voters’ perception of governing in coalitions, as well as on the analysis of the duration of coalition negotiations and of the content of coalition agreements. To conclude, we discuss approaches for future research that can be promising to further develop the scientific analysis of coalition governments, particularly in the light of massive progress in the field of quantitative data and text analysis.