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Social network site (SNS) data provide scholars with a plethora of new opportunities for studying public opinion and forecasting electoral outcomes. While these are certainly among the most promising big data applications in political science research, a series of pioneering studies have started to uncover the vast potential of such data to estimate the policy positions of political actors. Adding to this emerging strand in the scholarly literature, the present article explores the validity of (individual) policy positions derived from the social network structure of the microblogging platform Twitter. At the aggregate party level, cross-validation with external data sources suggests that SNS data provide valid policy position estimates. In contrast, the empirical analysis reveals only a moderate connection between individual policy positions retrieved from the social network structure and those retrieved from members of parliament individual voting record. These results thus highlight the potential as well as important limitations of SNS data in indicating the policy positions of political parties and individual legislators.

Why do some government formation periods end after a few days, while others last for several weeks or even months? Despite the rich literature on government formation, surprisingly little is known about the underlying bargaining processes. This article introduces a new dataset on 303 bargaining attempts in nineteen European democracies to analyse the duration of individual bargaining rounds. The study hypothesizes that (1) preference tangentiality, (2) ideological proximity, (3) incumbency and (4) party leadership tenure decrease the duration of coalition bargaining. Employing a copula approach to account for the non-random selection process of the observations, it shows that these actor-specific factors matter in addition to systemic context factors such as post-election bargaining and party system complexity. These findings highlight the need to consider both actor-specific and systemic factors of the bargaining context to explain government formation.

Although many studies analyse government formation and termination, there is only scant attention to the duration of government formation processes. The few existing studies focus on the empirical evidence of parliamentary democracies in Western Europe until 1998. We present a new data set on 297 government formation processes in 27 European countries that allows us to test models explaining delays in the government formation process developed in Western Europe using new data from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Our results suggest that these models perform much better in the Western European heartland of coalition studies than in the context of CEE. We highlight the implications of these findings and discuss potential avenues for future research.

AbstractGovernment formation in multi‐party systems often requires coalition negotiations and finding common ground among coalition partners. Supporters of parties involved in the government formation process face a trade‐off when evaluating such bargaining processes: on the one hand, voters usually prefer seeing their party being in government rather than in opposition; on the other hand, negotiations require coalition compromises that they might dislike. In this paper, we study voters' willingness to accept policy compromises during government formation processes. We argue that voters' acceptance of policy compromises depends on both the strength of their party attachment and the importance they assign to the issue at stake during the coalition negotiations. Not giving in on important issues is key, especially for supporters of challenger parties, who hold strong policy preferences on a selected number of issues. To test these expectations, we collected original survey data immediately after the Spanish general election in November 2019. The results show support for the hypothesized effects, shed light on the pressure potential coalition partners face during government formation and help explain the failures of government formation attempts in increasingly polarized societies.

Fighting corruption is a vital aspect of good governance. When assessing government performance voters should thus withdraw electoral support from government parties that turn a blind eye to or even engage in corrupt practices. Whereas most accounts of performance-based voting focus on economic outcomes, we analyse whether and to what extent voters punish incumbents for high levels of corruption. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we find that while voters perceiving high levels of corruption punish incumbents, corruption performance voting depends on individual-level attributes and the electoral context: it is most likely for non-partisans, for voters who believe that government turnover will bring about change, and in systems where corruption is a salient issue. Yet, corruption performance voting is not moderated by the clarity of political responsibility. Studying these conditions helps us to understand why corruption is more persistent in some contexts than in others.

AbstractMultiparty government in parliamentary democracies entails bargaining over the payoffs of government participation, in particular the allocation of cabinet positions. While most of the literature deals with the numerical distribution of cabinet seats among government parties, this article explores the distribution of individual portfolios. It argues that coalition negotiations are sequential choice processes that begin with the allocation of those portfolios most important to the bargaining parties. This induces conditionality in the bargaining process as choices of individual cabinet positions are not independent of each other. Linking this sequential logic with party preferences for individual cabinet positions, the authors of the article study the allocation of individual portfolios for 146 coalition governments in Western and Central Eastern Europe. The results suggest that a sequential logic in the bargaining process results in better predictions than assuming mutual independence in the distribution of individual portfolios.

This paper examines the validity of three approaches to estimate party positions on the general left–right and EU dimensions. We newly introduce party elite data from the comprehensive IntUne survey and cross-validate it with existing expert survey and manifesto data. The general left–right estimates generated by elites and experts show a higher congruence than those derived from party manifestos; neither measure clearly materializes as more valid regarding EU positions. We identify which factors explain diverging estimates. For instance, disagreement among experts has greater impact than their mere number. The substantial centrist bias of the manifesto estimates persists even when alternative documents are used to substitute manifestos. Low response rates among elites have no systematic detrimental effect on the validity of party position estimates.