How Different Mega-seats are Allocated in European Democracies?: The Study of the Baltic States

Recent years witnessed increased scholarly attention being paid to the concept of ‘mega-seats’ (i.e. prized post-electoral positions), their allocation patterns in European democracies and factors explaining them. Working with the data from the Baltic states, the paper demonstrates that there are significant differences how the ministerial portfolios and committee chair positions are allocated between the parliamentary party groups. Furthermore, it is shown that though all the governmental parties receive proportional shares of ministerial portfolios, substantial disproportionality exists in committee chair allocation where ideologically more radical parties receive significantly smaller share of committee chair positions. The paper proposes an interesting conclusion that the mainstream parties suffer smaller governance costs, if they allocate a proportional share of cabinet positions and a disproportionally smaller share of committee chair positions to the more radical coalition partners than vice-versa.