France: Electoral Necessity and Presidential Leadership Beyond Parties

Coalition-making in France is under-studied, due to the peculiar way coalitions are formed, maintained, and terminated. Due to the majoritarian two-round electoral system, parliamentary elections often result in a one-party parliamentary majority, which barely leaves room for post-electoral coalition bargaining. Coalition agreements are negotiated prior to elections. They mostly consist of pre-electoral deals in which the coalition’s senior party grant a few seats to its potential partner, after both parties agree on a laconic policy document. Moreover, in a semi-presidential regime where the executive enjoys increasing powers, coalition members play a small role compared to the president (or the prime minister in times of cohabitation). Cabinet formation and portfolio allocation rest in the discretionary power of the chief of the executive and no real (in)formal coordination or negotiation takes place. Over the past few decades, France has undergone major institutional and political transformations that have reinforced those dynamics, effectively increasing the weight of the president in coalition bargaining and leaving minor parties quite powerless.

Belgium: From Highly Constrained and Complex Bargaining Settings to Paralysis?

While Belgium undoubtedly had the most complex coalition bargaining system in Western Europe during the period 1946–1999, it has become much more difficult for parties to form federal governments ever since. Contrary to a number of European countries, government formation complexity did not peak due the emergence of brand-new parties, nor of any new cleavage. Rather, in Belgium the main ingredients pre-existed: party system fragmentation—which was already high since unitary parties had split along linguistic lines—skyrocketed as the mainstream parties around which post-war coalitions were formed further declined in size, confronting some (in)formateurs with up to ten coalitionable parties. Their task has been further complicated by the growing saliency and Flemish radicalization of the community cleavage which led to the rise of the independentist N-VA, whose positions remain unacceptable for any French-speaking party. As a result, Belgium has often been left without a fully empowered government, the partisan composition of coalitions broke away from previous patterns, and the coalition compromise model, which was already solidly entrenched in the consociational norms and practices since the 1960s, was further elaborated. Coalition partners keep tabs on each other through compromise mechanisms and policy-monitoring devices such as long and detailed coalition agreements, the enhanced role of the inner cabinet composed of the PM and the vice-PMs of each coalition party, and strictly enforced coalition discipline in legislative matters. But, given the increasingly unbridgeable divides between Flemish- and French-speaking parties, the deadlock observed could well lead to the demise of Belgium.

Whole of (coalition) government: Comparing Swedish and German experiences in Afghanistan

Whole-of-government (WOG) approaches have emerged as a blueprint for contemporary peace and state-building operations. Countries contributing civilian and military personnel to multinational interventions are persistently urged to improve coherence and enhance coordination between the ministries that form part of the national contingent. Despite a heated debate about what WOG should look like and how to achieve it, the causal mechanisms of WOG variance remains under-theorised. Based on 47 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, this study compares Swedish and German WOG approaches in the context of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). I argue that coalition bargaining drove the fluctuation in the Swedish and German WOG models. Strategic culture was an antecedent condition. In both cases, COIN and the war on terror clashed with foundational elements of the Swedish and German strategic cultures, paving the way for a non-debate on WOG on the political arena. Finally, bureaucratic politics was an intervening condition that obstructed or enabled coherence, depending on the ambition of the incumbent coalition government to progress WOG. Overall, the results suggest that coalitions face limitations in implementing a WOG framework when the nature of the military engagement is highly disputed in national parliaments.

The influence of Eurosceptic parties on the EU policies of member states

The aim of this research was to understand whether and how Eurosceptic parties might influence the EU policies of member states. It took the Netherlands and Hungary as case studies, focusing on the influence of Eurosceptic parties on the migration of those member states. For the Netherlands, the hard Eurosceptic PVV and soft Eurosceptic SGP were analyses in the period when the PVV was a parliamentary supporter of the VVD-CDA government (2010-2012). For Hungary, Jobbik’s influence on the EU policies of the Fidesz-KDNP government was analysis over the period 2015-2020. For the analysis, causal mechanisms were developed (using process tracing) from three literatures, namely: the contagion effect, coalition bargaining and parliamentary oversight. The results are summarised in the table below. The main points are that the PVV in the Netherlands, as parliamentary supporter, had a disproportionate influence on the government, since it threatened with withdrawing its support, thereby letting the government fall. The PVV did not have ministerial responsibilities (accountability), but was part of the weekly ministerial meetings. In the case of Hungary, the government, with its overwhelming majority, was able to take ownership of the issues that Jobbik proposed. Nevertheless, Jobbik’s more restrictive proposals are likely to have shifted the Fidesz government towards a more restrictive migration policy. Firstly, this research focuses on an urgent, and so far unanswered, question of what the influence is of Eurosceptic parties on the EU policies of member states. Secondly, in order to research this question, three literatures were used, namely: the coalition effect, coalition bargaining and parliamentary oversight. (Theoretical integration of these literatures to focus the research question.) Thirdly, this dissertation analyses Euroscepticism in Hungary and the Netherlands in detail and compares the policy implications on these two systems with each other. As a result, the conditions of Eurosceptic parties in policy are put into perspective, and the generalisability of the findings is touched upon.

Finding the bird’s wings: Dimensions of factional conflict on Twitter

Intra-party politics has long been neglected due to lacking data sources. While we have a good understanding of the dynamics of ideological competition between parties, we know less about how individuals or groups inside parties influence policy, leadership selection and coalition bargaining. These questions can only be answered if we can place individual politicians and sub-party groups like factions on the same dimensions as in inter-party competition. This task has been notoriously difficult, as most existing measures either work on the party level, or are in other ways determined by the party agenda. Social media is a new data source that allows analyzing positions of individual politicians in party-centered systems, as it is subject to limited party control. I apply canonical correspondence analysis to account for hierarchical data structures and estimate multidimensional positions of the Twitter accounts of 498 Members of the German Bundestag based on more than 800,000 tweets since 2017. To test the effect of intra-party actors on their relative ideological placement, I coded the faction membership of 247 Twitter users in the Bundestag. I show that Twitter text reproduces party positions and dimensions. Members of factions are more likely to represent their faction’s positions, both on the cultural and the economic dimension.

Slovakia

In Slovakia, the main lines of conflict that determine coalition formation have changed over time. Iinitially the conflicts were based on national-ethnic issues, later this was followed by disagreement over the direction of reforms and the European integration process. Eventually they have settled around socioeconomic policies with alternating right and left governments in power. Only three coalition cabinets have served the full parliamentary terms, and all of them have both enjoyed a majority support in Parliament and included a dominant large party. In contrast, coalitions without a major leading party, and where the power structure has been more evenly distributed, have been more likely to terminate due to inter-party conflicts before the end of the full constitutionally mandated term. The coalitions of the second type coalitions have also been pursuing more of consensual style of politics. They have been based on social-economic policy agreement between the parties but differed considerably in terms of the GAL-TAN dimension. While socioeconomic policies appear is a strong driving force in coalition bargaining, the second (GAL-TAN) dimension tends to matters more when it comes to the survival of the coalition. In terms of coalition governance, six out twelve cabinets represented the Prime Minister Dominated model. The cabinets with a leading party (HZDS, SDKÚ-DS, and SMER-DS) did not have as many internal conflicts as the cabinets with a relatively even power distribution. The latter type of cabinets relied instead on their ability to negotiate and compromise in the name of consensus and so they represent a Coalition Compromise Model.