We develop a new measure of party position based on a scaling of ideology tags supplied in infoboxes on political parties' Wikipedia pages. Assuming a simple model of tag assignment, we estimate the locations of parties and ideologies in a common space. We find that the recovered scale can be interpreted in familiar terms of 'left vs. right'. Estimated party positions correlate well with ratings of parties' positions from extant large-scale expert surveys, most strongly with ratings of general left-right ideology. Party position estimates also show high stability in a test-retest scenario. Our results demonstrate that a Wikipedia-based approach yields valid and reliable left-right scores comparable to scores obtained via conventional expert coding methods. It thus provides a measure with potentially unlimited party coverage. Our measurement strategy is also applicable beyond Wikipedia.

Research on government formation in parliamentary democracies has presented contradicting evidence on the role of political veto institutions and parliamentary polarization on the formation of cabinet types. Institutional rules may either provide significant leeway for political parties or seriously constrain them when forming sustainable coalitions. In contrast to previous studies we argue that the effect of political institutions is conditional on the degree of polarization in parliament. We test our hypotheses using original data on 842 cabinet formations in 33 advanced democracies between 1945–2018. In line with previous research, we find that the institutional rules have a pronounced effect on the type of cabinet formed, but that institutional rules moderate the effect of party system polarization. Thus, our findings provide important new insights on cabinet formation which are particularly relevant for today's increasingly polarized parliaments.

This chapter aims at presenting the characteristics of cabinets in Germany, in particular for the cabinets formed since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The chapter covers two decades of coalition dynamics and an era that has led to significant changes in German politics in general and the German party system in particular. The electoral support for the two catch-all parties – Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD) decreased in that time period, while the increased number of parliamentary parties and the increasing vote share for the smaller parties resulted in a more complex bargaining environment. We also discuss changes in the policy profiles of the parliamentary parties and how potential coalitions are discussed during election campaigns. The chapter provides first a brief overview on the institutional setting in which parties in Germany act and which influences the government-formation process, as well as the daily business of coalition governance. In a second step, we outline recent dynamics in the structure of the German party system. The final section summarizes the findings, considers if an overall trend in terms of changes in coalition governance exists in Germany, and discusses the impact of the parliamentary presence of a left- and a right-wing ‘pariah’ party—The Left and the Alternative for Germany—for coalition politics in Germany in the future.

In recent years, data structures in political science have changed and are now more diverse. Social media and digital trace data broaden the set of sources and the methodological portfolio in the social sciences. Here, we review and summarize these recent developments in the context of teaching political science methods. We argue that (i) teaching methods should be more connected to theoretical and substantive questions. Further, (ii) this should take place in the format of project seminars, which allows students to conduct independent research. Through new data sources, (iii) students are able to follow the entire research process - from generating data to analyzing the information. Only parts of the learning will take place in typical classroom teaching; (iv) programming skills will be supplemented through e-learning elements. The high focus on active learning elements and individual learning speed should raise the interest for quantitative methods among students of political science.

Zusammenfassung Die Datengrundlage in der Politikwissenschaft hat sich in den letzten Jahren stark verändert und ist breiter geworden. Daten sozialer Medien und digitale Spurendaten erweitern das Methodenportfolio in den Sozialwissenschaften beträchtlich. In diesem Artikel diskutieren wir Herausforderungen und Chancen dieser neuen Entwicklungen für die quantitative Methodenlehre in der Politikwissenschaft. Wir argumentieren, dass die Methodenlehre (i) stärker an Theorie und Inhalt geknüpft werden sollte. Dies erfolgt am besten durch (ii) Projektseminare, welche Studierende eigene Forschungsvorhaben umsetzen lassen. Mit der leichten Generierung durch neue Datenquellen, können Studierende (iii) den gesamten Forschungsprozess durchlaufen. Geringere Teile der Lehre werden als Präsenzveranstaltung abgehalten, (iv) Programmierfähigkeiten werden durch E‑Lernangebote ergänzt. Durch die hohe Praxisorientierung und eigene Lerntempi kann so ein Interesse für quantitative Methoden bei mehr Studierenden der Politikwissenschaft gebildet werden.

Here, we present Party Facts ( www.partyfacts.org ), a modern online database of political parties worldwide. With this project, we provide a comprehensive database of political parties across time and world regions, link party information from some of the core social science data sets, and offer a platform to link political parties across data sets. An initial list of 4000 core parties in 212 countries is mainly based on four major data sets. The core parties in Party Facts are linked with party information from some of the key social science data sets, currently 26. From these data sets, we have included and linked about 15,000 party observations. Party Facts is an important step in developing a more coherent operationalization of political parties across time and space and a gateway to existing data sets on political parties. It allows answering innovative party research questions that require the combination of multiple data sets.

How do electoral rules affect the composition of governments? It is a robust finding that countries with majoritarian rules more often elect conservative governments than those with proportional representation (PR) electoral systems. There are three explanations for this pattern. The first stresses the impact of voting behaviour: the middle class more often votes for right-wing parties in majoritarian electoral systems, anticipating governments’ redistributive consequences. The second explanation is based on electoral geography: the regional distribution of votes may bias the vote-seat translation against the Left in majoritarian systems due to the wide margins by which the Left wins core urban districts. The third explanation refers to party fragmentation: if the Right is more fragmented than the Left in countries with PR, then there is less chance of a right-wing party gaining formateur status. This study tests these three hypotheses for established democracies over the entire post-war period. It finds the first two mechanisms at work in the democratic chain of delegation from voting via the vote-seat translation to the formation of cabinets, while party fragmentation does not seem to co-vary as much as expected with electoral rules. These findings confirm that majoritarian systems have a substantive conservative bias, whereas countries with PR show more differentiated patterns.

Work on democratic delegation needs coherent and integrated recording of parties, elections and cabinets to study aspects of democratic representation such as electoral dynamics, cabinet formation and policy making. In this article, we present the methodological design of the ParlGov database and demonstrate how its operationalization of parties, election results and cabinets adds to a better understanding of political representation. The most recent version of the database includes 1177 parties, 735 elections (580 national, 155 European Parliament) and 1067 cabinets for democratic elections in 37 established democracies from 1945 to 2015. With this information we provide a definition of relevant political parties, a systematic recording of electoral results including electoral alliances and an adjustment to the definition of cabinets to account for potentially short lived cabinets. A replication of a prominent study by Hix and Marsh (2007) on second-order elections to the European Parliament (EP) demonstrates the added value of an integrated data source for a better understanding of electoral dynamics.

Measuring the power of the political left with the ‘share of social democratic cabinet seats’ is the gold standard in the literature on partisan effects. We argue that this measure of left power suffers from conceptual ambiguity and propose an alternative approach to measure the ideological orientation of governments based on their power in cabinets and data on party positions. We see several shortcomings of the traditional measure: the social democratic cabinet share neglects the fact that parties’ ideological profiles differ across countries and have significantly changed over recent decades. Also, specific policy measures of party preferences are often more appropriate to gauge the government’s position than relying on highly aggregated left/right measures. In addition, the social democratic cabinet share does not take into account the impact of coalition partners, cabinet decision making and the possibility of minority governments relying on parliamentary support outside the cabinet on the ability of parties to implement the social policies. After discussing the reasons for the conceptual ambiguity of existing indicators for the power of the left, we present alternative measures for the ideological orientation of the government based on the composition of cabinets and different information about party positions. We demonstrate how these measures can be combined to a single indicator that takes into account both the ideological position of governing parties in a particular policy domain and their power to affect cabinet decisions. We critically discuss the availability and merits of data on party positions and cabinet compositions and provide recommendations for constructing measures in welfare state research.

Ministerial careers can be notoriously nasty, brutish, and short, with the doctrine of ministerial accountability leading to numerous prematurely ended political careers. But how do European democracies compare? Looking at evidence from seven countries, Jonathan Bright, Holger Doring, and Conor Little show that younger ministers survive longer, right-wing parties are more likely to dump ministers than left-wing ones, and that large coalitions offer greater stability for ministers.

Are holders of important ministerial positions more likely to survive in cabinet than their colleagues who hold less important positions? This study examines the relationship between the importance of a ministerial position and the length of time ministers are able to survive in government. It is based on an original dataset of cabinet ministers in seven West European countries from 1945 to 2011. Employing a little-used measure of ministerial survival based on overall time in government, it is found that holders of important ministerial positions are more durable than their colleagues who hold less important ministerial positions. Age, prior government experience and the size of the party to which the minister belongs are also associated with consistently significant effects. Further, the study explores the determinants of survival for two types of risk - exiting government with one's party and exiting without it - showing that the effects of ministerial importance and other covariates are markedly different for these two types of exit. The findings have important implications for the understanding of ministerial and governmental stability.

Here, I introduce a novel approach towards data collection for comparative research and present a new data infrastructure on parties, elections and governments, the Parliament and Government Composition Database (ParlGov). This data infrastructure combines a database, data presentation in webpages and software scripts in order to generate more dynamic datasets and to facilitate cooperation. So far, it includes information about more than 1000 parties, around 600 elections (national and European Parliament) and almost 1000 governments with their party composition. These observations are linked to a wide set of information about party positions and make it possible to derive various datasets for studies in political science. To provide a first glance into the potential of this new data infrastructure, I map the political space of the European Union (EU) by drawing on this source.

This article investigates different dynamics in government formation in 16 Western and 10 Central-Eastern European democracies during the post-war period. The study provides the first systematic comparison of determinants of participation in government in the East and the West. Applying mixed effects logit regression models while taking into account missing values in the dataset, the results demonstrate substantial differences between the two regions and show that most of the existing findings about participation in government are driven by Western democracies. Policy-based factors are relevant in Western countries, but no indications were found for these factors in Central-East European democracies where membership of government is mainly the result of electoral gains and losses.

The literature on ministerial careers has recently been reinvigorated by individual contributions and collaborative projects. However, few studies of ministerial careers have been able to take into account the varying importance of ministerial positions. Fewer still have taken ministerial careers as their unit of analysis. As a result, they have been unable to account for crucial aspects of these careers. This paper seeks to fill these gaps, linking a crossnational data set on ministerial appointments and terminations with country-specific expert survey data that estimate the importance of ministerial portfolios. Among the new possibilities opened up by this data set of 977 ministerial careers is the systematic description of the structure of ministerial careers incorporating measures of ministerial importance. The paper contributes to the study of ministerial careers by introducing several innovations: a simple analytical framework for the analysis of ministerial careers; a new, crossnational data set on ministerial appointments and terminations incorporting data on ministerial importance; an approach to dealing with the problem of unconfirmed right-censoring that is posed by studying ministerial careers; new approaches to describing and measuring ministerial career structures that the ministerial careers framework and the new data set open up; and an agenda for the future development and use of this new data set on ministerial careers.