The Architecture of Coalition Governance

Coalition governments are vulnerable to problems resulting from diverging interests of the cabinet parties, mutual threats, and external shocks that may lead to premature government termination. To cope with these challenges, they typically employ mechanisms of mutual control. Despite the rich literature on coalition politics, we know surprisingly little about how coalition governments combine them to make coalition governance work. In this chapter, we use novel data on mechanisms of mutual control to study whether and how government parties use these mechanisms to devise regimes of coalition governance that employ means of control in complementary and synergetic ways. We synthesize the small but growing literature in a comprehensive theoretical framework and derive several hypotheses from it. Our empirical results suggest that there is a wide variety of coalition governance regimes across Europe. Moreover, while coalitions indeed tend to choose mechanisms as substitutes and complements, the majority of coalition governments choose a coalition governance architecture that seems to be ineffective or at least inefficient to cope with potential challenges of coalition governance. The results speak directly to existing studies of coalition governance and provide several avenues for future research.