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.

Whose preferences do political candidates in majoritarian systems represent on social media? Using the candidates' tweets during election campaigns in the UK, we examine whether candidates target copartisans, independents, or general preferences

We investigate how political candidates in the UK use Twitter to emphasize policy issues during election campaigns, and to what extent the issue priorities of
different voter groups affect their social media behavior. Drawing on approximately 750,000 tweets from nearly 5,000 candidates during the one-month campaign period before the 2015, 2017, and 2019 general elections in the UK, we examine the alignment between candidates’ online issue emphasis and the Most Important Issue (MII) responses of average voters, co-partisans, and independents at both the regional and national levels. 

We find that candidates’ Twitter activity most closely aligns with their co-partisans’ issue preferences. Candidates also represent the issues of general voters and independents but put less effort on those compared to the copartisans. Voters’ social media use, on the other hand, does not condition candidates’ online strategies.

Zeynep Somer-Topcu is a professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also one of the chief editors at the British Journal of Political Science, Vice-President of the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA), and the Chair of the Diversity Committee of the European Political Science Society (EPSS), among her other services. Her research interests are at the intersection of political parties and voter behavior in advanced democracies. Her recent book, Glass Ceilings, Glass Cliffs, and Quicksands: Gendered Party Leadership in Parliamentary Systems (coauthored with Andrea Aldrich), published by Cambridge University Press, examines the life-cycle of women party leaders from candidacy to their election to and termination from party leadership. She is currently working on a series of projects examining party campaign rhetoric and voter perceptions of party issue positions. Her research sheds light on why political parties adopt certain electoral strategies and on the electoral and behavioral consequences of these strategies.

Birgit Lodes explores how women inspired and performed, enabled and transformed Beethoven's music and legacy.

Beethoven dedicated printed works to sixty-three individuals––twenty-three of them women–– mostly from the high nobility or the “second society” that shaped Viennese musical life and patronage around 1800. Nearly all knew the composer personally and shared his enthusiasm for a refined ideal of music that functioned as social and symbolic capital in the Bourdieusian sense. Beethoven’s dedications thus can offer a window into the social conditions of composition, early performance practices, and the meanings attached to these works. The pieces Beethoven dedicated to women—chiefly songs and piano compositions—not only reflect the gendered norms of musical education and salon culture central to his professional life, but, as I will argue, were often specifically crafted to suit the individual tastes and abilities of these women. 

Several of these works might never have existed without the inspiration and engagement of these female patrons and performers. Shifting the focus from the composer’s public “heroic” oeuvre to works reflecting his artistic and social engagements within these circles reveals a different Beethoven: one deeply embedded in the musical, cultural, and sociological networks of his time. Reconsidering these contexts challenges long-standing nationalist and bourgeois-masculine narratives and highlights the active, formative role of aristocratic women as patrons, performers, and mediators of Beethoven’s art in Habsburg Vienna.

Birgit Lodes studied in Munich, at UCLA, and at Harvard University. Since 2004, she has been Professor of Historical Musicology at the University of Vienna and currently serves as Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair at Stanford University. She is a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and editor-in-chief of the series Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich. Her research focuses on musical life in Central Europe around 1500 (https://musical-life.net/en), as well as on Beethoven, Schubert, and their circles.

Rosamund Johnston charts how, during the Cold War, arms production shaped interactions between different groups in communist Czechoslovakia and underlay the country’s relationship with the rest of the world.

Czechoslovakia, rarely thought of as one of the Cold War's major players, was perhaps the biggest exporter of small arms to Africa throughout the 1960s. And lurking in the background of Cold War crises—from Guatemala and Suez in the 1950s to Angola and Afghanistan in the 1980s—were Czechoslovak weapons.

In this talk, I follow the flow of commodities from the Czechoslovak provinces to the Cold War's flashpoints, excavating the role played by Czechoslovak arms in shaping global conflict in the twentieth century. Conversely, I show how global conflict shaped class configurations and gender relations on the factory floor. Rather than a top-down tale of politics and diplomacy, I focus in turns on the state's leaders, arms dealers, munitions workers, international students, and the general public to demonstrate the complex web of interactions upon which Czechoslovakia's international arms trade relied. To do so reveals both the sovereignty of Soviet "satellite" states during the Cold War and socialist internationalism's shifting forms.

Rosamund Johnston is the Principal Investigator of Linking Arms: Central Europe's Weapons Industries, 1954-1994 at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET), University of Vienna. She is the author of the award-winning Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969 which appeared with Stanford University Press in 2024. She has also written for Central European History, The Journal of Cold War Studies, East Central Europe, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Scottish newspaper The National, and public broadcaster Czech Radio. Johnston is the main editor of The Routledge Handbook of 1989 and the Great Transformation (to be published in January 2026), and has authored one book of public history, Havel in America: Interviews with American Intellectuals, Politicians, and Artists, released by Czech publisher Host in 2019.

REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

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REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

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