Studies on coalition formation assume that political parties have two major goals: They aim to maximise the share of office and policy payoffs. Thus, they tend to form coalitions with small parliamentary majorities and with parties that have similar programmatic positions. In this paper, we argue that standard coalition theory disregards the preferences of the electorate in general and of the party supporters in particular. We test our argument by analysing government formation at the regional level in a comparative framework. The results, derived from a conditional logit model and based on a dataset that covers policy preferences of regional actors and party and policy preferences of voters, support our argument: coalitions are not only more likely if they fulfil the criteria of office and policy seeking coalition theories and if they are in line with the patterns of party competition on the superior level of the respective political system, they are also more likely to be formed if the respective party combination is preferred by a majority inside the electorate.
