Coalition Governance in Western Europe

Abstract

Coalition government is the most frequent form of government in Western Europe, but there is relatively little systematic knowledge about how this form of government has developed in recent decades. This volume analyses governments that have formed in the Western European countries since the Second World War and covers the full life cycle of coalition governments from the formation of party alliances before elections to coalition formation after elections, governing and policy-making when parties work together in office, and the stages that eventually lead to governments terminating. Since the early 1990s, many coalition governments form in a context of increased fragmentation of party systems, increased polarization, and the rise of populist parties. The volume captures these changes and examines their implications for the different stages of the coalition life cycle. A particular emphasis of the volume is on the study of how coalitions govern together even when they have different agendas. Do individual ministers decide, or the prime minister, or are the policy outputs of a government a result of a process of coalition compromise? Focusing on the coalition governance stage, we analyse the variation in the use of various control mechanisms across countries, for example showing that many coalition governments draft extensive contracts to control their partners in cabinet. The volume covers 16 West European countries and introduces the case of Croatia. Systematic cross-national data is available in an online appendix.