TY  - GEN
A1  - Ganghof, Steffen
A1  - Eppner, Sebastian
A1  - Stecker, Christian
A1  - Heeß, Katja
A1  - Schukraft, Stefan
T1  - Do minority cabinets govern more flexibly and inclusively?
BT  - evidence from Germany
T2  - Postprints der Universität Potsdam Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2  - A widespread view in political science is that minority cabinets govern more flexibly and inclusively, more in line with a median-oriented and 'consensual' vision of democracy. Yet there is only little empirical evidence for it. We study legislative coalition-building in the German state of North-Rhine-Westphalia, which was ruled by a minority government between 2010 and 2012. We compare the inclusiveness of legislative coalitions under minority and majority cabinets, based on 1028 laws passed in the 1985–2017 period, and analyze in detail the flexibility of legislative coalition formation under the minority government. Both quantitative analyses are complemented with brief case studies of specific legislation. We find, first, that the minority cabinet did not rule more inclusively. Second, the minority cabinet’s legislative flexibility was fairly limited; to the extent that it existed, it follows a pattern that cannot be explained on the basis of the standard spatial model with policy-seeking parties.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe - 114 
KW  - Australian bicameralism
KW  - pledge fulfillment
KW  - majority formation
KW  - veto players
KW  - patterns
KW  - coalitions
KW  - consensus
KW  - democracy
KW  - parties
KW  - policy
Y1  - 2019
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-434175
SN  - 1867-5808
IS  - 114
SP  - 541
EP  - 561
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Eppner, Sebastian
A1  - Ganghof, Steffen
T1  - Institutional veto players and cabinet formation
BT  - the veto control hypothesis reconsidered
JF  - European journal of political research : official journal of the European Consortium for Political Research
N2  - Are potential cabinets more likely to form when they control institutional veto players such as symmetric second chambers or minority vetoes? Existing evidence for a causal effect of veto control has been weak. This article presents evidence for this effect on the basis of conditional and mixed logit analyses of government formations in 21 parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies between 1955 and 2012. It also shows that the size of the effect varies systematically across political-institutional contexts. The estimated causal effect was greater in countries that eventually abolished the relevant veto institutions. It is suggested that the incidence of constitutional reform is a proxy for context-specific factors that increased the incentives for veto control and simultaneously provided a stimulus for the weakening of institutional veto power.
KW  - government formation
KW  - veto players
KW  - second chambers
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12172
SN  - 0304-4130
SN  - 1475-6765
VL  - 56
IS  - 1
SP  - 169
EP  - 186
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Hoboken
ER  -