‘Natural because it had become just that.’ Path dependence in pre-electoral pacts and government formation: A New Zealand case study

Formal models of government formation frequently find their predictions confounded in the real world and/or fail to explain empirical observations, leading to calls for new approaches. The formation of New Zealand's 1999 minority coalition government-one which ran counter to the predictions of all conventional coalition theories-illustrates the potential contribution of path dependence to those approaches, particularly when we are trying to explain why pre-electoral pacts are relatively good predictors of government composition.