Where Are Coalition Agreements Located?

We do not know how coalition agreements relate to party preferences. We may have the intuition that coalition agreements are always within the preference range of their members and that it is mainly influenced by the strongest party in the coalition. We use Principal Component Analysis to quantitatively analyze the text of coalition agreements, party manifestos, and investiture speeches of Spanish regional governments between 2005 and 2011. Contrary to expectations we find that, although coalition agreements seem to be closer to the most powerful parties, coalition agreements seem to fall outside the preference range of their members. However, the agreement is closer to government parties than opposition parties, suggesting that coalitions seem to be specially interested in pushing agreements away from opposition parties even at the expense of their own preferences.