Centre parties and coalition cabinet formations: a game theoretic approach

The centre is an interesting concept for formal models of, for instance, political coalition formation, but also for European party systems. In this article, the focus will be on centre parties and their impact on coalition cabinet formation. Using game theory, we describe one concept of the centre, the central player, and we introduce a concept of a strong centre, the dominant central player. With these concepts of the centre, we will predict what kind of coalitions will be formed. These prediction principles will be confronted with data of cabinet formations in France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Ireland and The Netherlands (1945–1988). We show that these centre-oriented prediction principles of coalition formation perform well in our data set.