Party Competition and Coalition Formation
| Published date | 01 October 2004 |
| Date | 01 October 2004 |
| Author | Daniela Giannetti,Itai Sened |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629804046151 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
PARTY COMPETITION AND COALITION
FORMATION
ITALY 1994–96
Daniela Giannetti and Itai Sened
ABSTRACT
Formal theory has often been criticized for shying away from empirical testing,
which brought some to wonder about its empirical relevance altogether.
Theorists, on their side, often responded by accusing much of the empirical
work in political science as being devoid of any theoretical guidance. This
paper argues that part of the problem is due to the problematic fit between
traditional quantitative research and abstract theoretical models. Here, we
illustrate how one could bridge the gap by connecting the ever puzzling realities
of Italian parliamentary politics with a theoretical model of multiparty parlia-
mentary systems. The empirics of Italian politics raise more questions than
answers and the theoretical model we apply seems awfully complex and frus-
tratingly abstract. With the use of relatively simple visual tools, we believe
that we help make some sense of the complex realities of Italian politics and,
in the process, demonstrate the empirical relevance of the theoretical model
we chose to apply.
KEY WORDS .Italy .political coalitions .formal models .multiparty
parliamentary systems .party competition
1. Introduction
Within the literature on coalition politics and government formation in
multiparty parliamentary systems, Italy emerges as a particularly complex
case. Most of the post second World War Italian coalition governments
have been minority or surplus coalitions. This looked puzzling from the per-
spective of the pure office-seeking rational choice approach to the study of
coalition formation (Axelrod, 1980; Strom, 1990; Laver and Schofield, 1990).
More empirically oriented researchers have been troubled by the apparent
Journal of Theoretical Politics 16(4): 483–515 Copyright &2004 Sage Publications
DOI: 10.1177/0951629804046151 London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi
This paper is based on research supported by NSF grants Nos. SBR 97-30275 and SBR 98-
18582. We thank Michael Laver and Norman Schofield for helpful comments and encourage-
ment. We also thank Nicola Iacobone and Renato Mannheimer for providing us with data
and Kevin Quinn for help with the data analysis.
instability of Italian governments (Sartori, 1976; Pridham, 1987). Under-
standing Italian politics has become even harder following the institutional
upheaval of the early 1990s.
More recently, Mershon (1996a, b, 2002) has made a significant contribu-
tion to study of Italian politics by combining a rigorous theoretical approach
with careful data analysis. In this paper we return to the study of Italian
coalition politics, guided by a recent theoretical model of multiparty parlia-
mentary systems put together by Schofield and Sened (2002). We do not dis-
pute Mershon’s earlier analysis, we follow her initiative to bring the analysis
to the next step of precision and clarity.
As noted by Laver (1998), within the multidimensional policy-driven
models of coalition formation, the research program based on cooperative
game theory developed by Schofield is the only one that attempts to link in
a unified model party competition and coalition formation.
1
For studying
Italy, the use of this integrated approach at least promises to yield a better
understanding of parties’ electoral strategies and coalition bargaining.
Any application of spatial theories of coalition formation to empirical
cases requires data about party policy positions. Different sources of data
are used in this paper. For party policy positions before 1996, we rely on
the most updated version of the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP)
(Budge et al., 2001). The methodological status of the CMP data set,
obtained via content analysis of parties’ platforms, can be questioned on
various grounds. First, the CMP research strategy is meant to ascertain
salience of issues rather than party positions on those issues (Laver, 2001).
Second, party positions derived from the content analysis of party platforms
do not necessarily coincide with voter perceptions of these positions.
Consequently, for the 1996 elections, we use original data combining mass
and expert survey data we have collected ourselves. We believe that this
methodological strategy is better suited to determining parties’ policy posi-
tions as they are based on expert judgements and voter perceptions which
are represented in comparable ideological spaces. This is why our study is
mainly focused on the 1996 elections, where information about other elec-
tions is used mostly for illustrative purposes. Moreover, we use a visual
approach to empirical data analysis in order to make the complexities of
Italian politics more readily explicable. This facilitates examination of the
Italian political system with simple and intuitive diagrams and maps.
Structure of the paper: In Section 2, we summarize the theoretical mod el of
multiparty parliamentary systems (MPS) developed by Schofield and Sened
(2002). In Section 3, we introduce the idea of visualizing techniques and
484 JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL POLITICS 16(4)
1. The seminal work of Norman Schofield on the subject that spans over two very productive
decades (e.g. Schofield, 1993, 1995, 1996).
argue for their usefulness in demonstrating the empirical relevance of rational
choice theories. In Section 4, we give an systematic account of Italian elec-
toral and coalition politics before 1992. In Section 5, we discuss the institu-
tional revolution of the 1990s. Sections 6 and 7 interpret election and
coalition formation following the 1994 and 1996 campaigns respectively.
2. A Theoretical Model of Multiparty Parliamentary Systems
(MPS)
The Schofield–Sened (2002) model of multiparty parliamentary systems
(MPS) is characterized as a four-stage social choice mechanism or sequential
game (Austen Smith and Banks, 1988):
1. a Pre-Election Party Positioning Game,
2. the Electoral Game,
3. the Coalition Bargainin g Game and
4. the Legislative Game.
Let P¼f1;...;i;...;pÞdenote the set of parties and N¼f1;...;;...;nÞ
denote the set of voters. Assume a policy space R
w
, with an arbitrary dimen-
sion, w. Each voter, , has a quasi-concave utility function assumed to be
Euclidean, of the form uðyÞ¼ajjyxjj2, where xis the voter’s ideal
point, ais a voter-specific positive constant and yis any policy position in
the policy space. Let z¼ðz1;z2;...;zpÞbe the vector of declared positions
of all parties and zi¼ðz1;z2;...;zi1;ziþ1;...;zp) be the vector of
declared positions of all parties except i. A vector v¼ðv1;...;vp) represents
the vote shares of the parties and a vector eðvÞ¼ðeðv1Þ;...;eðvpÞÞ the seat
allocation in parliament where eðvÞis determined from vby the electoral
rule. An electoral response function ðzÞis assumed to be a common knowl-
edge stochastic function of voter’s response to z, where iðzÞis the prob-
ability that voter m will vote for party i, given a declaration profile z.ðzÞ
is interpreted as representing the beliefs that party principals have over the
electoral response.It does not imply that each voter behaves stochastically.
The voter’s choice may be strategic or sincere but the party elite is not able
to elucidate completely the basis of such sincere or strategic choices. It is
sensible, therefore, to suppose, that the proportions of voters that party
leaders believe would vote for the different parties is described by the
stochastic electoral response ðzÞ.
In the following sub-sections, we explain how the game is played and
resolved using the logic of backward induction (Selten, 1975). Agents
involved in coalition bargaining must know what the legislative process
stage is going to look like in order to partake in the bargaining over future
GIANNETTI AND SENED: PARTY COMPETITION, COALITION FORMATION 485
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