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An Analysis of Israeli Coalition Formation and Cabinet Post Distribution

As literature examining the application of game-theoretic models to political coalitions has flourished in the past few decades, the conclusions found by different types of models yield different predictions regarding payoff proportionality in parliamentary coalitions. While demand bargaining models predict pure payoff proportionality, proposal-based models predict that the formateur should receive a disproportionately large share of the total payoff—a phenomenon referred to as the formateur’s advantage. We apply a statistical model that incorporates this idea to calculate the predicted share of cabinet posts received by member parties of Israeli Governments 25–35, and then compare these predictions to each party’s actual share of cabinet posts in each government. We find a very strong correlation (r = .936) between the predicted and actual shares of cabinet posts for all parties, but find that the formateur’s advantage, while present, is overestimated by bargaining models, as the extent of the advantage is heavily determined by the context in which governments are formed. We then cross-analyze discrepancies in our data with the real-world factors that caused them in order to present evidence that empirical context should always be accounted for when applying game theoretic models to parliamentary coalition formation.