The mood among coalition partners in multiparty governments may vary over time. The enthusiasm and unity after a government formation process may turn into frustration and anger, if the collaboration in government is not working well. Yet, these systematic and time-varying differences between multiparty governments have hardly been taken into account to assess the performance of multiparty governments. In this paper, we present a new approach to measure the coalition mood, defined as the atmosphere between government parties. Based on an automated analysis of over 175,000 plenary debates in Germany (1998-2015) and Austria (2003-2018), we develop a time-varying measure of the atmosphere among coalition partners. We conclude by highlighting future applications of the coalition mood for research on coalition politics and public policy.
