Karen A. Feste

Qualitative Dimensions of Coalition Payoffs: Evidence From European Party Governments, 1945-1970

on the earlier research of Browne and Franklin (1973; Browne, 1973: ch. 5), who attempted to describe the quantitative properties of payoff distributions in this same context. These authors take as their point of departure Gamson’s (1961: 376) major assumption concerning payoff distributions: &dquo;Any participant will expect others to demand from a coalition a share of the payoff proportional to the amount of resources they contribute to a coalition.&dquo; Operationalizing payoff share as the percentage of ministries received by partners in the coalition and the resources of each member as the percentage of parliamentary seats it furnishes in the coalition, a very high degree of association was found between the variables (r = .926), and the relationship was almost perfectly proportional (Y -0.01 + 1.07X).

Scaling Ministerial Payoffs in European Governing Coalitions

n a recent article, Browne and Feste (1975) have studied the I distribution of particular (identified) cabinet ministries among members of governing coalitions, attempting to account for specific distributions as being a function of particular attributes of the coalition actors. Expecting that governing parties of differing size and ideological attributes would receive disproportionate numbers of particular ministerial portfolios, their results showed that parties largest in their coalitions (coalition leaders) tended to receive a disproportionate share of particular ministries, but that no distribution pattern was observed for other categories of size or ideological orientation. This suggested that the distribution of a major set of cabinet ministries isdominated by a “coalition leadership principle.” The present work attempts to broaden our understanding of the process of distributing cabinet portfolios by describing their actual distributional configurations. Utilizing a scaling analysis technique, our purpose will be to determine whether specific portfolios are distributed in characteristic patterns across a universe of thirteen countries with multiparty systems and a time span of some twenty-seven years (19451972).’ In this initial attempt to explore possible “preference dimensions” for ministerial distributions, our scalar analysis will measure the extent t o which given portfolio types are observed to be distributed in characteristic patterns (being distributed together either often or sel-