Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Logic Of Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation, Sona Nadenichek Golder '89

Doctoral Dissertations

Political parties who wish to exercise executive power are typically forced to enter some form of coalition. Parties can either form a pre-electoral coalition prior to an election or they can compete independently and enter a government coalition afterwards. Although there is a vast coalition literature, there are no theoretical or empirical studies of coalitions that form prior to an election. This dissertation seeks to redress this imbalance in our knowledge of coalitions by explaining the variation in electoral coalition formation.

The existing literature implicitly suggests that pre-electoral coalition formation is a simple function of electoral rules: the more disproportional …