Who Gets into Government and How is Power Shared? Sona Golder revisits two classic government formation questions with new data and new methods.

Who gets into government? Empirical scholars conceptualize government choice as a discrete choice problem in which a government is selected from the set of potential governments. Existing studies define potential governments as any combination of parties that could form a government. However, potential governments with the same partisan composition are not necessarily equivalent. A potential AB government where A is the prime ministerial party is different from a potential BA government where B is the prime ministerial party. Neither political elites nor voters view these potential governments as interchangeable. In this paper, we demonstrate how a reconceptualization of potential governments allows us to jointly model the choices of prime ministerial party and government. Our proposed strategy narrows the gap between theory and empirics, allowing us to test previously 'untestable' hypotheses. It also allows us to integrate the previously separate literatures on the choice of prime minister and the choice of government in a unified framework.

How is power shared within governments? Is there a prime ministerial (PM) party advantage when it comes to ministerial portfolio allocation in coalition governments? Early models of government formation predicted that PM parties would be advantaged when portfolios are allocated. Empirical studies based on postwar Western Europe, though, show that portfolios are allocated fairly proportionally with, if anything, a slight PM party disadvantage. In recent years, scholars have sought to resolve this troubling disconnect between theory and empirics by developing new theoretical models that better match 'empirical reality.' In this paper, we question the purported empirical reality. Using original data on (i) a global sample of postwar non-presidential democracies, (ii) interwar European democracies, and (iii) subnational Indian governments, we find that PM parties are rarely disadvantaged across different regions, time periods, and institutional settings. Indeed, we generally find a significant PM party advantage. Our findings highlight a potential danger of repeatedly testing and revising theories based largely on the same empirical cases.

Sona N. Golder is Professor of Political Science at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on political institutions, especially in the context of coalition formation. In addition to articles in a variety of general and comparative politics journals, such as the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, and Politics & Gender, she has published four books, including The Logic of Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation, Multi-level Electoral Politics, and Principles of Comparative Politics. She's currently working on a fifth book on Interaction Approaches to Intersectionality that's under contract at Cambridge University Press. She's also a co-PI on a multi-year project funded by the Norwegian Research Council examining party instability and party switching in parliaments (INSTAPARTY). 

Professor Golder has served as the lead editor of the British Journal of Political Science as well as on multiple editorial boards. She is currently an Associate Editor for Research & Politics and on the editorial board of Political Science Research and Methods. She also previously edited the Newsletter of the Comparative Politics Organized Section of the American Political Science Association.