New Developments in the Study of Coalition Governments

Patrick Dumont is Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University, Canberra (Australia). He has been visiting researcher at the Peltason Center for the Study of Democracy, University of California, Irvine (2014-2015). He is co-editor of the Routledge Research on Social and Political Elites book series, was the co-founder of the Standing Group on Elites and Political Leadership of the European Consortium for Political Research, and its co-convenor from 2015 to 2021, as well as chair of the Research Committee on ’Elites’ of the International Political Science Association from 2018 to 2023. He has published extensively on coalition politics; his recent research projects also focus on electoral campaigns and political representation in Europe and Australia.

Bernard Grofman is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine (US) and former director of the Peltason Center for the Study of Democracy. Professor Grofman’s research focuses on voting behaviour, redistricting, the impact of electoral rules on political outcomes, and behavioral social choice. He has published numerous books including A Unified Theory of Party Competition, A Unified Theory of Voting, and Electoral Laws and their Political Consequences along with hundreds of journal articles.

Torbjörn Bergman is Senior Professor of Political Science at Umeå University (Sweden). He has previously held Research Chair positions at the Luleå University of Technology and Södertörn University Stockholm. He has also been a Visiting Researcher at the University of California, San Diego (1999-2000) and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (2006-2007). His research is particularly focused on the struggle for government power and the issue of democracy at two interconnected levels, Sweden and the EU. He has notably co-edited several reference volumes on coalition politics at Oxford University Press. Prof. Bergman has established a large Internet-based data archive that includes information about all democratic governments in Europe’s stable parliamentary democracies since World War II. This data archive, which is widely used by comparative political scientists and in particular coalition politics scholars, is available at https: //repdem.org/.

Tom Louwerse is Associate Professor in Political Science at Leiden University (The Netherlands). His main areas of interest include elections, political representation, parliaments, political parties, elections, polls and voting advice applications. His main research project, Who opposes?, focuses on government-opposition cooperation in parliament and its consequences for democratic legitimacy and vote choice. It is supported by a Vidi grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Well published in the field of coalition politics, Prof. Louwerse is in addition very active in outreach initiatives such as the poll aggregation projects Peilingwijzer in the Netherlands and the Irish Polling Indicator.