A dataset containing information on coalition governments and their member parties across 30 parliamentary democracies. The data are in long format where the unit of analysis is parties in governments, making it suitable for multiple-membership multilevel models where governments (groups) are composed of multiple parties (members).
coalgovA tibble with 2,077 rows and 18 variables. Each row represents a party's participation in a specific coalition government. The sample contains 628 governments formed by 312 unique parties across 29 countries.
Identifiers:
Government identifier (group-level unit in mm() specification).
Range: [3, 1105]
Party identifier (member-level unit in mm() specification).
Range: [11110, 96955]
Country identifier (nesting-level unit in hm() specification).
Range: [11, 96]
Three-letter country code (ISO 3166-1 alpha-3)
Full party name
Government-level variables:
Date of the preceding election that led to the government's formation. Range: [1939-04-02, 2014-12-14]
Number of parties in the coalition (group size for weight functions). Range: [2, 9], mean: 3.31
Government duration in days, measured from investiture to termination (outcome variable for survival models). Range: [7, 1840], mean: 554.5
Early termination indicator: 1 = government terminated due to political conflict (voluntary resignation, dissension within government, lack of parliamentary support, or head of state intervention) more than one year before the official end of term; 0 = censored (regular elections, other reasons, or termination within one year of scheduled elections). Range: [0, 1], mean: 0.39
Majority government indicator: 1 = coalition controls majority of parliamentary seats, 0 = minority government. Range: [0, 1], mean: 0.80
Minimal winning coalition indicator: 1 = coalition would lose its majority if any party left, 0 = oversized coalition. Range: [0, 1], mean: 0.35
Inter-party ideological heterogeneity. Standard deviation of coalition parties' left-right positions (from CMP) relative to the ideological distribution of all parties in parliament. Standardized and inverted so higher values indicate greater ideological cohesion. Range: [-8.40, 2.12], mean: 0.04
Country-level variables:
Investiture vote requirement (time-constant country characteristic): 1 = country requires formal parliamentary investiture vote, 0 = no formal requirement. Range: [0, 1], mean: 0.46
Party-level variables:
Party's relative seat share within the coalition, computed as
pseat / sum(pseat) within each government. Sums to 1 within each coalition.
Range: [0.00, 1.00], mean: 0.33
Prime minister party indicator: TRUE = party holds prime
ministership (n = 628), FALSE = junior coalition partner (n = 1,449)
Intra-party ideological cohesion, measured using an adaptation of the Cowles-Jones ratio. Computed as the ratio of continuous ideological shifts to reversals in a party's left-right position over time. Higher values indicate more consistent ideological trajectories (greater cohesion). Standardized. Range: [-1.13, 3.85], mean: 0.00
Party's left-right ideological position (from CMP). Measured on a continuous scale where higher values indicate more right-wing positions and lower values indicate more left-wing positions. Standardized. Range: [-3.21, 3.68], mean: 0.00
Party's economic dependence on member contributions (from PPDB). Measured as the share of party funding from member dues relative to total income. Standardized; higher values indicate greater dependence on member financing. Treated as time-constant due to data limitations. Range: [-0.98, 4.40], mean: 0.00
Number of party members (from PPDB). Standardized; treated as time-constant due to data limitations. Range: [-0.33, 15.02], mean: 0.00
This dataset demonstrates multiple-membership multilevel modeling where:
Members: Political parties (identified by pid)
Groups: Coalition governments (identified by gid)
Nesting: Governments nested within countries (identified by cid)
Each coalition government comprises multiple parties, and parties can participate in
multiple governments over time. This creates a multiple-membership structure where
party-level characteristics are aggregated to the government level using weighting
functions specified in mm() blocks.
Sample: After matching party data across sources and excluding single-party and caretaker governments, the sample comprises 628 governments formed by 312 unique parties across 29 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and United Kingdom.
Measurement notes:
Government duration follows the WKB convention: time from investiture to termination or new elections
Early termination events focus on political gridlock (conflict-related endings) and exclude terminations within one year of scheduled elections
Party-level variables (cohesion, finance, Nmembers) are
standardized (mean = 0) for analysis
Seki, K., & Williams, L. K. (2014). Updating the Party Government data set. Electoral Studies, 34, 270-279.
Volkens, A., et al. (2016). The Manifesto Data Collection. Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR). Version 2016a. Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung.
Scarrow, S. E., Webb, P. D., & Poguntke, T. (Eds.). (2017). Organizing Political Parties: Representation, Participation, and Power. Oxford University Press.
bml for modeling examples using this dataset
data(coalgov)
# Explore data structure
str(coalgov)
table(coalgov$cname)
# Number of unique units
length(unique(coalgov$gid)) # Governments
length(unique(coalgov$pid)) # Parties
length(unique(coalgov$cid)) # Countries
# \donttest{
# Model: government duration as function of majority status and party characteristics
m1 <- bml(
Surv(dur_wkb, event_wkb) ~ 1 + majority +
mm(id = id(pid, gid), vars = vars(finance), fn = fn(w ~ 1/n), RE = TRUE) +
hm(id = id(cid), type = "RE"),
family = "Weibull",
data = coalgov
)
summary(m1)
# }
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