Coalition Governance in Central Eastern Europe

The proposed research project studies coalition governance in Central Eastern Europe (CEE). The key objective is to analyse how political parties with conflicting policy interests cooperate in order to resolve conflicts and reach joint decisions. While a wealth of scholarly research explains which governments form and how long they last, coalition governance is still an emerging research field. The project will focus on the ten new EU Member States in CEE. Its data collection is largely based on content analyses of political texts (e.g. coalition agreements) and media reports. Interviews with participant observers provide additional information on behavioural regularities. These data are gathered with the help of country experts and analysed based upon a common coding scheme. We aim to make four contributions to the existing scholarly literature. First, the project adds to our knowledge of coalition governance in a new set of countries for which little is known so far. Second, this new set of observations gives us the opportunity for out-of-sample testing of theories developed in the Western European context. Third, by increasing the number of observations and variance on key variables we can mitigate the notorious large-p- small-N problem in coalition research. Fourth, the project extends the theoretical framework by incorporating explanatory factors that we expect to be particularly relevant in the political and economic history of CEE countries. In particular, we analyse the effect of distrust between cabinet parties caused by their role in the `ancien régime` and their behaviour in previous coalition governments as well as the role of uncertainty due to the transition process and electoral volatility. Three kinds of output emerge from this research project: First, an edited volume including country chapters for each of the ten CEE EU Member states (authored by the country experts). They provide in-depth analyses of national patterns of coalition governance against the background of the party system and institutional rules. Second, comparative journal articles testing both theories developed in the Western context and novel hypotheses relating to characteristics in CEE. Finally, the project will produce a comparative data set and a textual archive.

The project "Coalition Governance in Central Eastern Europe" aimed to analyse how political parties work together in coalitions, resolve conflicts and come to joint decisions. The entire `life cycle` of coalitions from the formation of government, to governing itself, to the dissolution of coalitions was considered. The project covered the ten Central and Eastern European countries that joined the European Union between 2004 and 2007 and analysed all governments from the time of the first democratic elections after the communist era, which took place in the early 1990s in all countries, until 2014. The results show that governing in coalition governments in the region partly follows known patterns from Western European countries but differs greatly from them in other aspects. Governments in Central and Eastern Europe are more severely punished by voters than those in Western Europe and suffer greater losses of votes in elections following their terms of office. For this reason, there are fewer early elections; instead, new governments often form during a legislative period or parties withdraw from governments. The party systems in most of the regions countries of are less stable than in Western Europe. There are many swing voters, new parties often enter parliament, but they disappear just as quickly. This results in more colorful` and diverse coalitions than can be observed in Western Europe. In other areas a very rapid adaptation to Western Europe could be observed some developments in Central and Eastern Europe took place much faster through learning processes made possible by observing the Western European countries. While it, for example, took several decades in the West after the Second World War for coalition agreements to gain widespread acceptance and to be written by almost all governments, this process only took a few years in Eastern Europe. The process was similar with other mechanisms of conflict resolution and control in coalition governments but most of these mechanisms are less pronounced, less efficient and operate differently than in Western Europe. Eastern Europe also differs from Western Europe in the way it is governed: there is greater fragmentation within governments, with each party having relatively large room for manoeuvre in `its` ministries; the heads of government have more power in most countries than in their Western European counterparts.