Presidents and the duration of coalition bargaining in Europe

Why do some coalition governments take longer to form than others? There is a limited literature that addresses this question which largely concentrates on the fragmentation and polarization of the coalition bargaining environment and the institutional rules of government formation. However, the role of the head of state in coalition negotiations has been entirely overlooked by the literature to date. In this paper, I argue that presidents can significantly shape the process of coalition bargaining. In systems in which presidents have the power to propose their own candidate for Prime Minister coalition bargaining is significantly shorter than in those countries that have a constitutional monarch as head of state or in which the president does not have the power to name a candidate for Prime Minister. This arises for two reasons: first, the presidential power to nominate a PM provides parties in the legislature with an incentive to conclude coalition negotiations swiftly and conclusively; if a president is able to exercise their power to nominate a PM this signals a shift in the constitutional balance of powers away from the legislature which would naturally be anathema to parties in the parliament. Second, when the president is from a party other than that initially charged with forming a government, the party that is given the first chance to form the coalition has a competitive incentive to ensure that the president's nominee is not afforded the opportunity to form the government. I test this argument using data from European countries over the period from 1960 to 2012. Using the survival models that are the standard mode of analysis in this field of research I demonstrate that the presence of a president significantly reduces the duration of coalition bargaining.