I agree with Matt Yglesias that it is pretty amazing how quickly the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives were able to form a coalition government. This is not just so in comparison to the United States but also in comparative terms. In the countries that I know best, coalition formation takes weeks if not months and tends to produce long documents in which the terms of the coalition agreement are laid out in painstaking detail. By contrast, the British coalition seems based on a pretty loose set of principles and was negotiated in a similarly ad hoc manner (if you haven’t seen it yet, check out the Guardian’s analysis of a photograph taken of Nick Clegg’s negotiation notes).
It turns out that there is interesting crossnational variation in how long coalition formation takes. Lanny Martin and Georg Vanberg (gated) report in an article in the British Journal of Political Science that Danish and Swedish coalitions generally form within a week after the elections. In Austria, Belgium, and Italy it takes over a month and in the Netherlands even three months before a new government is formed. They show some evidence that bargaining takes longer as there are more parties involved and as the ideological distance between the parties is relatively large. Both these factors would have pointed to a relatively long process in the British context. In a different paper, Daniel Diermeier and Peter van Roozendaal show (gated) that negotiations that can begin immediately after the elections and that are held after a government defeat should last longer. Again, the British case would appear to be an outlier here.
One possibility is that this literature hasn’t looked sufficiently at institutional differences, such as the absence of a formal majority investiture vote in parliament, as well as different rules and norms that govern the coalition formation process. For example, in some countries a head of state first appoints an informateur who seeks to identify a likely coalition of parties that agree on some basic principles. After this a formateur is appointed who negotiates the details of a government agreement exclusively with the identified potential coalition partners. (There are also some countries where coalitions routinely form prior to elections, which should speed up post election bargaining).
Perhaps past experience also plays a role. If you have once been burned by failing to negotiate the terms to a government agreement, you may want to insist on clearer terms the next time around. Remember, it has been a long time since there has been a coalition government in Britain. Given the many difficult decisions the government faces, not in the least on how to balance the budget, one needs not go out on a limb to predict that there will soon be important issues on the table that the coalition partners have not yet bargained about. It would seem equally unadventurous to predict that this government will not last five years.
