About one third of all governments in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are minority governments. Characteristic is that they do not control the majority of seats in parliament. At first glance minority governments seem to be a counterintuitive phenomenon. Why should a party decide to stay in opposition and to forgo the benefits of government participation, but support a government that has no majority? Government formation processes in the CEE countries are a rich and up to now widely unexplored area of scientific research. Research on minority governments as well as on government formation in general has so far been mainly focussing on Western (European) countries. Are the influencing factors that are valid for the formation of minority governments in Western Europe such as institutional facts (e.g. investiture votes or an opposition''s influence possibilities) or the policy positions of parties (ideological centrality of the largest party) applicable to the Eastern European context, or do the underlying factors differ due to the different political background? The aim of this paper is to illustrate the combination of conditions which lead to the formation of minority governments in CEE. In the first part, hypotheses are derived from the fully developed coalition-research and -theory regarding Western Europe as well as from close examination of the existing hypotheses and the empirical evidence of (minority) governments in CEE. In the second part I give an overview on how the determining factors are integrated in a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (comprising all minority governments formed after elections) combined with in-depth case-studies.
