This paper aims to estimate the relationship between the policy and office motivations of parties in coalition-formation processes at the German federal-state level. For this goal, we expand Sened’s model which includes weighting parameters for both motivations. We introduce a statistical method which enables the parameter estimation based on this model. Data of German state-level coalition-formation processes are obtained by coding of election-manifestos of the German state-level parties since 1990. The data contains state-level party-positions on four different policy-dimensions which correspond to the socio-economic and socio-cultural conflict lines in the German context and are each directly related to the specific coalition-formation process in a given federal-state.
