Gamson's Law & Government Dissolution: An Experimental Analysis

• In Event: The Life-Cycle of Multiparty Parliamentary Government

Abstract

The standard models of coalition formation have a hard time accounting for the well-document empirical regularity of coalition parties being allocated cabinet portfolios in proportion to their size. Game theoretic models of government formation typically assume that the game ends with the formation of a coalition. A more realistic assumption is that the parties accrue payoffs over the lifetime of the coalition, which introduces concerns for government survival.  This introduces incentives to form stable coalitions that can explain why bargaining outcome are more proportional than the standard Baron-Ferejohn model predicts.  In this manuscript we examine the prediction of a simple model of government formation that allows for government dissolution in an experimental setting.

Author

• Indridi Haukur Indridason, University of California, Riverside