Replication Data for: Bargaining Complexity Beyond Arithmetic

Political scientists lack a generally accepted definition of bargaining complexity, and attempts to quantify the complexity of political negotiations as such are rare. We argue that bargaining complexity is best defined as the amount of choice facing the negotiating actors, and best operationalized as the entropy of the probability distribution across potential bargaining outcomes. We apply this general approach to 343 government formation processes in advanced democracies, predicting the selection probability of each potential government using a state-of-the-art government formation model that integrates both arithmetic factors based on the number and size of parties, and inter-party relations such as ideological dispersion and pre-electoral coalitions. We then demonstrate how to use our measure to disentangle between different determinants of bargaining complexity. Lastly, we show that bargaining complexity is robustly related to how many potential governments and partners were considered but ultimately set aside during negotiations, and to the resulting cabinet's durability.

政治学者尚未就讨价还价复杂度（bargaining complexity）形成公认的定义，且针对此类政治谈判复杂度开展量化研究的尝试亦较为罕见。我们认为，讨价还价复杂度的最佳定义为谈判行为体所面临的选择总量，其最优操作化路径为潜在讨价还价结果的概率分布熵（entropy）值。我们将这一通用研究框架应用于发达民主国家的343个组阁（government formation）流程之中，采用一款集成了基于政党数量与规模的量化因子、以及意识形态离散度、选前联盟等政党间关系的当前最先进组阁模型，对每一个潜在内阁组合的获选概率进行预测。随后我们演示了如何借助本测量工具，厘清讨价还价复杂度的各类不同决定因素。最后我们证实，讨价还价复杂度与谈判期间被纳入考量但最终搁置的潜在内阁与执政伙伴数量，以及最终组建内阁的存续稳定性均存在稳健的相关性。