Evgeny Sedashov: Institutional Constraints on Coalition Formation (Contemporary Issues in Political Science Research Seminar)

The next meeting of the Contemporary Issues in Political Science Research Seminar at the Faculty of Social Sciences will be held on March 5.

Speaker: Evgeny Sedashov, Associate Professor at the School of Politics and Governance, HSE.

Subject: Institutional Constraints on Coalition Formation

As Strøm, Budge, and Laver convincingly argue in their 1994 article, political parties face a number of hard and soft institutional constraints in the process of government formation. Even though empirical models of coalition formation have since then regularly included institutional variables, they do not give justice to this idea as they tend to ignore the implicit interactivity of the effects of institutional and non-institutional factors. In this paper, we remedy this issue by employing the constrained choice conditional logit model (Moral and Zhirnov, 2018). We model coalition formation as a two-step process. The first step produces a set of institutionally viable potential government coalitions and is informed by the electoral outcomes, the rules of coalition formation, legislative institutions, and pre-electoral alliances. The second step determines which of these viable coalitions is installed; it is informed by the ideological and policy proximity among potential coalition partners. Our findings suggest that the factors related to the institutional viability of a proto-coalition do not only exert a direct effect on the success of that coalition, but also condition the process of policy bargaining within viable proto-coalitions.

Work language: English.
Where: Moscow, 3 Krivokolenny Pereulok, Room 3-204.
When: March 5, 3:10 – 4:30 p.m.

If you need a pass please contact Olga Lebedeva (olebedeva@hse.ru) and Elena Sleptsova (esleptsova@hse.ru) before 5:00 p.m. on March 5.