The Political Geography of Government Formation

Political parties differ in the geographic distribution of their supports. The paper argues that a territorially asymmetric distribution of a party’s votes facilitates its participation in government because it will prioritize demands of locally-targeted goods that are going to make an agreement based on a logrolling of policies with other potential partners easier. Using a measure based on the Gini coefficient, the paper empirically evaluates the extent to which the geographic concentration of the vote plays a role in the formation of governments taking Spanish local elections from 1987 to 2011 as a laboratory. With around 500 formation opportunities and 20,000 potential governments, multinomial choice models are estimated (conditional and mixed logits) and a very sizable effect is documented: a one standard deviation increase in the electoral geographic concentration of a potential government almost doubles the likelihood of formation. The findings are relevant both for scholarly research on government formation and political geography.