Isabelle Guinaudeau awarded a Best Paper Prize at the ECPR 2023 general conference

Along with her co-author Elisa Deiss-Helbig (University of Konstanz), Isabelle Guinaudeau, a CNRS Research Fellow at the CEE, has been awarded the Best Paper Prize granted by the ECPR Standing Group on “Public Opinion and Voting Behaviour in a Comparative Perspective” for a paper presented at the 2023 ECPR General Conference.

In their article, "From Electoral Pledges to Coalition Agreements: Coalition bargaining and policy payoffs in Germany (2002-2021)", Elisa Deiss-Helbig and Isabelle Guinaudeau study which election pledges end up in coalition agreements and which are abandoned during negotiations to form a government coalition. Based on original longitudinal data on the inclusion of German governing parties’ electoral pledges in coalition agreements over two decades, the two authors reveal that coalition negotiations filter out conflictual electoral pledges, including those made by the largest parties. One might have expected each party to focus their efforts on placing their proposals on their issues of predilection. But coalition agreements rather reflect a lowest common denominator.

The prize committee, composed of Wouter van der Brug (University of Amsterdam), Kees Aarts (Twente University), Romain Lachat (Sciences Po) and Hanna Wass (University of Helsinki) chose this paper because it does an excellent job in combining political science relevancy and sound theorising, with a solid research design and skilful analyses of freshly collected data, yielding convincing and interesting results.

Find out more

• Abstract of the article
• Isabelle Guinaudeau’s personal page