CABINETS OPERATING RULES AND COALITIONN FORMATION IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

After the fall of communism in the late ’80 in Central and Eastern Europe, due to the appearance of several political parties in each state, there was the need to form coalitions in order to provide support for the governments. This paper aims to identify the institutional features that influence the coalition formation process using the rational choice institutionalism approach. In this case, the political parties, who seek to optimize their benefits in the government formation process, are constrained by the institutional environment. The institutional environment comprises the rules that determine how the governments are formed. Particularly, this paper aim is to identify how the cabinet operating rules affect the outcomes of the coalition formation process. In order to do so, I will develop a quantitative analysis of 110 cabinets in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria formed after the first free elections subsequent to the communist fall until the beginning of 2010. These countries represent the post-communist states that joined the European Union, finalizing the democratization process at least from a formal point a view. This cross-country comparison tries to explain how some institutional features influence the formation of coalitions in new democracies. This research is valuable due to the lack of this type of comparative studies on Central and Eastern European states