How do political blocs form, consolidate, and dissolve? And can we trace these dynamics through the language of parliamentary debate? We address these questions by analyzing speeches in the Swedish Riksdag, using supervised machine learning to examine changes in rhetorical alignment among parties. Adapting classification methods developed for two-party systems to a multiparty context, we assess rhetorical alignment between and within Sweden's political blocs across nine legislative periods (1991-2023). The results closely match expectations: rhetorical cohesion between parties was strongest during the peak of formal alliances (2006-2014) and declined during subsequent periods of political realignment. These findings demonstrate that parliamentary rhetoric offers a valuable lens for tracking the rise and fall of political blocs. More broadly, the study shows how supervised machine-learning classification can capture long-term shifts in party-system structure within multiparty democracies.

During the past decade, many parliamentary democracies have experienced bargaining delays when forming governments. The previous literature has attributed protracted government formation processes to a high degree of preference uncertainty among the political parties and a high level of bargaining complexity. The article draws on such theories, but also adds a third theoretical mechanism, commitment problems, and highlights two explanatory variables that have not received much attention so far. The first is pre-electoral coalitions, which are declarations by parties stating that they intend to collaborate with each other after the election. The second is familiarity, which is the mutual trust between parties that comes from having worked together in the past. By combining a large-N study of government formation processes in 17 West European parliamentary democracies (1945-2019) with an in-depth case study of the prolonged Swedish government formation process in 2018-2019, it is shown that pre-electoral coalitions that fail to win a majority can sometimes delay, not speed up, government formation. In addition, a lack of familiarity may sometimes lead to a breakdown of negotiations and drawn-out government formation processes.

In parliamentary democracies, elections distribute the seats in parliament, but who gets into government and determines the policy agenda over the course of the legislative term is decided upon after the elections, in negotiations between the political parties. This introduction to the special issue discusses research concerning dynamic approaches to coalition governments. A dynamic approach implies that what happens at the electoral stage influences the government formation stage, which in turn shapes what happens during the government's tenure, which may influence the cabinet's durability. Hence, this type of research tries to analyse various stages of a government's 'life cycle' from its 'birth' to its 'death' as interdependent processes, rather than examining them in mutual isolation. These processes may be restricted to the confines of a self-contained universe of politicians and political parties, or they may involve 'external' events, such as, for example, elections, or the state of the economy. In addition to having a dynamic approach to analysing coalitions, the contributions in the special issue use brand-new comparative data from several independent research projects investigating various aspects of coalition politics.

The first part of the concluding chapter discusses novelties and conceptual challenges that we have noted during our observation period (2008–2021). After this, we focus our attention on coalition politics and its political institutions, particularly regarding the different governance models. Later we discuss the consequences of the three crises identified in the introductory chapter as the main ones since 2008: the financial crisis, the migration crisis, and the Covid crisis. In the final section, we highlight whether the crisis-ridden period has meant new patterns in coalition politics and whether it has resulted in regional unity or diversity. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is now the backdrop against which national politics is played out.

With this book, we update the analysis of politics in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) along the coalition life cycle. Based on ten country chapters, and a concluding comparative chapter, more than 80 tables and several figures, we present and analyse information on the period from 2008 through 2021. The period saw three major crises, the financial crisis, the migration crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic – as well as tendencies towards democratic backlash in some of the countries. In this chapter, we present the coalition life cycle approach in light of the many challenges that faced the CEE countries since 2008. The Russian invasion of Ukraine on March 24, 2022, is outside of our observation period, but it is, of course, a tremendous challenge for the countries in the region and our contributors are among the first to incorporate observations on how that invasion may impact national coalition politics.

Abstract This chapter focuses on governments in Sweden, a country which has a relatively high share of minority governments, over 70 percent, in the post-war period. Most governments formed during this period have been single-party Social Democratic cabinets, supported by one or more parties in parliament, but there have also been several cases of minority coalitions. Swedish politics has historically been characterized by a strong emphasis on a near-unidimensional political conflict along the left–right policy dimension, and a negative parliamentary system which most likely account for the high occurrence of minority cabinets. The chapter describes Sweden as a prime example of what has been called ‘contract parliamentarism’, where minority governments often had support party arrangements in the form of an explicit written contract with one or more opposition parties, publicly committing the partners to a policy agreement. The chapter also shows that minority governments in Sweden have performed well, with a high share of government bills having passed through parliament, a high survival of cabinets, and a high level of electoral support. The legislative successes are partly because of contract parliamentarism but also because opposition parties can gain substantial policy influence via the rather strong parliamentary committee system.

This chapter focuses on presenting the main research questions and answers provided in the literature on the different stages of the coalition life cycle. For example, focusing on the first stage—the formation stage—several researchers have tried to explain why specific types of governments form. Other scholars have asked why it takes longer to form governments in some contexts, or have tried to explain how parties distribute ministerial and policy payoffs when forming a cabinet. Focusing on the second stage of the coalition life cycle, we review the growing literature on coalition governance, concentrating on three coalition governance models; the ministerial autonomy model, the coalition compromise model, and the PM-dominated model—each of which make different assumptions about the actors that dominate the governance process in coalition governments. Focusing on the last phase of the coalition life cycle, the termination of governments, scholars have long aimed to explain the duration of cabinets, asking why some cabinets last longer than others. At the end of this chapter, we present some expectations about changes to the coalition life cycle which we are likely to observe considering the party system change we have seen in many Western European countries.

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.

The aim of this article is to examine which factors robustly influence cabinet duration in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). In this respect the article investigates the role political institutions (including vote of no-confidence procedures), parliamentary and cabinet attributes, and various contextual factors have on cabinet stability. By using a type of sensitivity analysis (i.e. Extreme Bounds Analysis) on a panel of about 180 cabinets in CEE, it is possible to examine which factors consistently predict the probability of government survival. It is found that only a few factors are robust to alternative model specifications, namely: government type, fragmentation in parliament, the level of unemployment, and restrictive no-confidence votes procedures which make it more difficult for the opposition to bring down a government. Thus, the results indicate that cabinet duration in CEE is not primarily affected by sui generis factors to the region, but by factors of more general relevance.

We here summarize and compare the empirical results found by our country authors, focusing on the coalition life cycle in seventeen countries. The chapter starts with a description of the changes that have occurred during the past decades in the party systems of Western Europe, and some institutional rules surrounding government formation and duration. We then turn to the comparing patterns of government formation across countries, showing that coalitions constitute almost 70 per cent of the cabinets in Western Europe, and that the Scandinavian countries have been dominated by minority cabinets. Focusing on the coalition governance stage, we analyse the variation in the use of different control mechanisms across countries, for example showing that many coalition governments draft extensive contracts to control their partners in cabinet. The comparative data we present also shows that such agreements have become longer over time. Focusing on the last stage of the life cycle, we show that in a majority of countries, it is more common that a cabinet terminates early than serves the full term. There has also been a clear trend towards more government instability, even though the variation in cabinet duration across countries is large. We conclude this chapter by returning to the three coalition governance models described earlier in this volume, classifying the countries as being closer to one of the three models, based on a number of indicators and the information provided by our country experts.

This chapter examines coalition formation and coalition governance in Sweden. Swedish coalition politics have historically been characterized by a near-unidimensional political conflict along the left–right policy dimension, along with minority government rule (and a high share of minority cabinets).. In addition, Swedish politics has long been characterized by ‘two-bloc politics’, where the socialist and the non-socialist bloc have competed for power. However, the growing electoral successes for the populist radical right party, the Sweden Democrats, has recently and at least temporary, ended this. Although the increasing fragmentation and polarization of Swedish politics has made bargaining over government more difficult, it has not changed how coalition cabinets work and the existing practices of coalition governance since the early 1990s remains intact. Collegiality and consensus are still the dominant characteristics of Swedish coalition governance.

This chapter describes the ambitions of the volume. First, we build on the lessons from earlier studies of governments in Western and Central Eastern Europe to deepen our understanding of the coalition life cycle, covering the three stages of a government’s ‘life’, beginning with the formation process, then turning to the governance stage, and lastly turning to the final phase when governments eventually terminate. Second, we seek to capture how recent changes in the Western European party systems, which are also described here, influence the various stages of the coalition life cycle. Third, we are in particular interested in how coalition partners cooperate and make policy once a government has formed, aiming to contribute to the growing literature on the topic of coalition governance. The chapter ends with a description of the content of the volume.

This chapter shows that in most European democracies liberal parties are not only represented in parliament but have also been in office at some point in time. In fact, liberal parties have been unusually successful at getting into government and have been in power to an extent that far exceeds their electoral or parliamentary strength. The chapter provides a comparative examination of the patterns of government participation, or lack thereof, of liberal parties in 28 European democracies from 1945–2015. It looks at the control of ministries, and thus potential policy impact. The chapter utilizes a new and updated dataset on ministerial portfolio allocation to be able to investigate which kind of portfolios Liberal parties tend to get and how frequently they have obtained portfolios in the European countries under study. It summarizes the findings and discussing what might lie ahead for Europe's liberal parties.

BackgroundLabour market policies in Sweden is a state responsibility. Even though the municipalitieshave created their own units for labour market issues. This has resulted in parallel systems,and ...

The idea that the stability of governments is affected by how they are performing in the polls is both intuitive and popular in the literature. When support is low the government might be inclined to replace parties or the prime minister in order to regain support, thus forming a replacement government. Alternatively, a government doing well in the polls might opportunistically try to schedule an early election to capitalise on its favourable prospects. But despite the popularity of the idea, it has thus far not been tested empirically whether government stability is in fact influenced by popular support. This article aims to address this lacuna. Using a relatively new dataset with more than 12,000 unique polls, and recently developed Bayesian models for pooling the polls, it is here shown that government stability is in fact impacted by popular support. Governments display clear signs of electoral opportunism when they are polling well and, conversely, dissolve the government, without calling an election, when polling is bad. The results are strongest when there are few parties in the government, since agreement on the timing for a discretionary termination is easier when fewer players need to agree.