JAN TEORELL

webinar link:  https://zoom.us/j/98746624932  

Title: Bargaining delays in polarized parliamentary democracies

(Authors: Hanna Bäck (Lund University), Johan Hellström (Umeå University), Johannes Lindvall (Lund University) and Jan Teorell (Lund university))

Abstract: After the Swedish parliamentary election of 2018, it took 134 days to install a new government. This is the longest government formation process in the country’s history, and this process is also long by comparative standards. What caused the delay, and what causes bargaining delays in general in the Western European democracies? The purpose of this paper is, through a mixed-methods design, to contribute to the literature on parliamentary government formation, and to analyze the impact of features related to political polarization on coalition bargaining duration. Taking the election results as a given, we follow the literature in combining preference uncertainty and bargaining complexity among the political parties as the two main explanatory mechanisms at work. We hypothesize that the risk of bargaining delays will increase in the presence of populist radical right parties, if such parties hold a sort of ‘balance of power’. We also hypothesize that an increase in polarization may lead to bargaining delays, but only in settings where either ‘side’ cannot form a viable government. We combine a large-n study of about 400 government formation processes in 17 West European parliamentary democracies in 1945-2018 with an in-depth case study based on 37 interviews with leading Swedish politicians, allowing us to get analyze the impact of uncertainty using more valid measures than have been used in the previous literature on bargaining duration. 

Bio: Jan Teorell is professor of political science at Lund University. He has twice won the Lijphart, Przeworski, and Verba Award for Best Dataset by the APSA Comparative Politics Section, and he is the author of Determinants of Democratization (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and co-author of Varieties of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2020). His work has appeared in journals such as the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Democracy, Governance, Political Research Quarterly, and Studies in Comparative International Development. His research interests include political methodology, history and comparative politics, comparative democratization, corruption, and state making.