The paper develops a theoretical framework for tracking and explaining change in democracies and applies this framework to long-established non-presidential democracies. It investigates the extent to which coordination failure in the formation of democratic majorities can explain stimuli for institutional change. Colomer (2005) focuses only on electoral coordination failure and the resulting change of electoral rules. He argues that we see a trend towards proportional representation (PR) because it makes coordination failure less likely. In contrast, the paper highlights that majority-coordination in democracies is a multi-stage process and that PR systems may merely shift it to a later stage. The paper proposes a multi-stage analysis of coordination failure. It distinguishes four stages at which the problem of majority coordination problem can be solved: (1) party formation, (2) alliance (pre-electoral coalition) formation, (3) cabinet formation and (4) law formation. It argues that we can distinguish four basic coordination regimes based on the stage at which the problem of coordination is primarily solved. A typical Westminster democracy solves it at the first stage, countries like Germany at the second stage, countries like Finland at the third stage, and countries like Denmark at the last stage. Coordination failure at each stage can create stimuli for institutional and / or behavioral change. The paper explores ways to measure coordination regimes and coordination failure over time and space. The basic hypothesis is that a high degree of coordination failure provides a stimulus for change. The hypothesis is not, however, that change is generally in the direction of regimes that solve the coordination problem at later stages. There are many examples of change in the opposite direction, including Japan (in the direction of party-level coordination) or Italy (alliance-level coordination). The paper argues that all four basic coordination regimes may constitute a “behavioral-institutional equilibrium” and explores the background conditions for these equilibria. Moreover, the paper also treats institutional deviations from pure parliamentarism as such as strong bicameralism in Australia or assembly-independent government in Switzerland as hybrid coordination regimes with specific equilibrium properties.
