Franz Urban Pappi, Axel Becker, Alexander Herzog
Regierungsbildung in Mehrebenensystemen: Zur Erklärung der Koalitionsbildung in den deutschen Bundesländern

Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 2005: 46, issue 3, pp. 432-458

The German federal governmental system is conceptualized as a full-fledged two-level system, in which the Länder governments participate in federal policy decisions via the second chamber Bundesrat and in which the stakes of state coalition building are high for the federal parties. Our research question is whether we can find systematic empirical evidence for an influence of federal on state parties to build state governments whose party composition is concordant with federal politics, containing either exclusively federal governmental or non-governmental parties. We answer this question by indirect evidence. We show that such concordant majority coalitions occur above average even if important coalition predictors are controlled as minimal winning coalitions or participation of dominant and/or central players. We predict the 182 actual Land governments which were formed in the period from 1949 to 2003 compared to the possible governments in each situation.