AbstractFrom 1987 to 1998, the Basque government was made up of a coalition between Basque nationalists and unionists. However, there are doubts about whether this experience has a consociational character. In order to clarify this, the article analyses the four characteristics of Lijphart's scheme, focussing on the degree of power‐sharing of the Basque governments using the qualitative distinction of McGarry and O'Leary and the centripetal approach, creating the power‐sharing in government index and studying the degree of ideological proximity of the parties making up the coalition. The conclusions are that in the Basque case, there were no complete or concurrent consociational governments, but instead, there were centripetal coalitions. Furthermore, it makes clear that an electoral system with high proportionality is an obstacle when it comes to maintaining cross‐segment governments in societies that lack stability in the correlation of forces among segments and use centripetal power‐sharing coalitions or weak or concurrent consotiational coalitions. The most realistic choice in order to preserve the power‐sharing government would be adopting a proportional sequential coalition and a proportional electoral system with significative electoral threshold to avoid the emergence of anti‐consociational parties.
The Shapley value for an n-person game is decomposed into a 2n × 2n value matrix giving the value of every coalition to every other coalition. The cell ϕIJ(v, N) in the symmetric matrix is positive, zero, or negative, dependent on whether row coalition I is beneficial, neutral, or unbeneficial to column coalition J. This enables viewing the values of coalitions from multiple perspectives. The n × 1 Shapley vector, replicated in the bottom row and right column of the 2n × 2n matrix, follows from summing the elements in all columns or all rows in the n × n player value matrix replicated in the upper left part of the 2n × 2n matrix. A proposition is developed, illustrated with an example, revealing desirable matrix properties, and applicable for weighted Shapley values. For example, the Shapley value of a coalition to another coalition equals the sum of the Shapley values of each player in the first coalition to each player in the second coalition. ; publishedVersion
Formal coalition theory has tended to ignore the existence of local government coalitions. Local government studies have tended to ignore the existence of formal coalition theory. Yet local administrations frequently comprise coalitions of parties. There is clearly a need, therefore, to bring the two areas of study together.
"Coalition signals can offer crucial information to voters during political campaigns. In multiparty systems, they reduce the number of theoretically possible coalitions to a much smaller set of plausible and likely coalitions. Strategic voters who care more about the formation of the next coalition government than supporting the preferred party might, for example, defect from the preferred party in favor of another party that might produce a more desirable coalition government. For other voters, coalition signals might merely elicit affective responses which can shift the vote. In this study, we investigate whether and how different coalition signals affect vote intentions and activate different party and coalition preferences. We report the results of a nationally representative survey experiment conducted before the 2006 Austrian General Election. Respondents encountered four vignettes with hypothetical coalitions, each followed by the standard vote intention question. The results indicate that voters are responsive to coalition signals, and especially voters with two preferred parties tend to change their vote intentions. Finally, a more detailed look at Green Party voters suggests that individual party and coalition preferences help to explain the direction of these changes." (authors abstract)