Replication Data for: A New Approach to the Study of Parties Entering Government

Previous studies of the factors that influence the ability of parties to join governments have estimated binary choice models using the parties as the unit of analysis, which inappropriately treats each party in a government formation opportunity as an independent observation (a problem that clustered standard errors do not solve) and does not allow researchers to control for important coalition-level effects. This article demonstrates that a preferred methodological approach is to first estimate a standard multinomial choice model (conditional logit or mixed logit) of coalition formation, using government formation opportunities as the unit of analysis and potential governments as the choice alternatives. The probabilities of parties joining governments can then be recovered by simply summing the probabilities for the potential governments that contain each party. An empirical example shows how the substantive conclusions about a party's likelihood of entering office can change depending on the methodological approach taken.

过往针对政党参与组阁能力影响因素的相关研究，均以政党作为分析单位构建二元选择模型。此类研究存在两处不当之处：其一，将某一特定组阁契机下的各政党视作独立观测值（即便采用聚类标准误也无法修正该问题）；其二，无法让研究者对关键的联盟层面效应进行控制。本文论证指出，更合理的研究范式应当是：以组阁契机作为分析单位、以潜在内阁作为选择备选项，首先构建联盟组建的标准多项选择模型（条件logit模型或混合logit模型）。后续仅需对包含某一政党的所有潜在内阁的概率进行求和，即可还原该政党参与组阁的概率。一则实证案例展示了：针对政党就职概率的相关实质性结论，会因所采用的研究方法不同而发生变化。