Parteide poliitiliste vaadete roll valitsuskoalitsioonide moodustamisel: Eesti ja Slovakkia näited

Abstract

The main aim of this thesis is to assess the possible role of parties policy preferences in coalition formation. Author will assume that coalition will be ideologically coherent around formateur. Author will test this assumption on the cases of Estonia and Slovakia. The role of policy will be assessed on the basis of the data of the Manifesto Project (MP). The Manifesto Project (formerly known as Comparative Manifesto Project) is the most comprehensive and arguably the best available source of information on the policy positions of parties. The project consists of a content analysis of election manifestos whereby the content of manifestos (political statements) is categorized across categories. The proportion of each category for a manifesto is calculated and thus the final data for each party manifesto is the proportions of the manifesto devoted to each of these 57 categories. Almost all previous reserch on this topic has been based on left-right scale. Instead of using left-right scale, author of this thesis will suggest that better way to assess parties ideological proximity is to compare relevant parties election manifestos. Methodology of this thesis is based on two steps. The first thing, which should be done, is to determine the formateur on each case.The second, the Manifesto Project database would be updated and restructured from around elections to around coalition governments, which have actually formed. Also, the policy difference between pairs of 39 political parties will be calculated as the total sum of differences across all the 56 substantive dimensions of the Manifesto Project dataset, which will be used to assess the difference between parties instead of the left-right scale. This would, among other things, allow to create a measure of policy proximity for each coalition by considering the differences between the formateur and its coalition partners versus other parliamentary parties. Results from Estonia and Slovakia show that although policy plays somewhat important role in coalition formation, it is hard to assess is it the main preference when parties choose their government partners.