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¹⁰ Although large parties are generally undercompensated, formateur parties in particular are disadvantaged. A model in which we regress a party's share of portfolios against its share of the government's legislative seats and a dichotomous variable capturing formateur status results in a coefficient on formateur status that is negative (−0.02) and highly statistically significant (p < 0.002). Far from receiving a bonus, formateur parties appear to be penalized.

¹¹ Baron and Ferejohn, ‘Bargaining in Legislatures’.

¹² Austen-Smith and Banks, ‘Elections, Coalitions, and Legislative Outcomes’; Baron and Ferejohn, ‘Bargaining in Legislatures’.

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¹⁷ Formateur parties may decide to provide some additional portfolios to small parties if doing so facilitates passing legislation. Note, though, that the ‘blackmail’ potential of small parties is restricted when there is no vote of no confidence, because legislative defeats do not threaten the existence of the government and hence the formateur's continued access to office benefits.

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²⁰ Our approach obviously involves trade-offs. One drawback is that we vary the level of government, something that a cross-national analysis would avoid.

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²² Although the French regional governments have a narrower set of competencies than the national government, they have continued to gain powers since their creation in the Deferre Reforms of 1982. For example the regional governments are currently responsible economic development, job training, secondary education, the environment and infrastructure (including ports and airports).

²³ As is typical in unitary countries, provisions do exist for sub-national governments to be dissolved under exceptional circumstances. In the case of France, for example, these provisions can be applied if the sub-national government finds it ‘impossible to function’. Note, though, that the regional assembly cannot bring the government down with a vote of no confidence. Rather, an appeal must be made by the regional prefect to the Minister of the Interior, after which the national government decides whether the request should be granted (Council of Europe, Directorate General of Democracy, and Political Affairs, ‘Interim Dissolution of the Local/Regional Councils: Results of RRS No 10 [LC-IC(2009)12]’, 2009. http://www.eerstekamer.nl/id/vieliabbdus2/document_extern/100422bijl2_lr_ic/f=/vieliattqfv6.pdf, accessed 5 May 2010. To date, this provision has never been successfully exercised.

²⁴ Warwick and Druckman, ‘The Portfolio Allocation Paradox’.

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²⁶ Given our desire to hold constant as many contextual features as possible across regions, we omitted Corsica, Guadeloupe, French Guyana, Martinique and Réunion because the party systems in these regions have historically been different from those found in the twenty-one regions of ‘mainland’ France.

²⁷ See http://www.france-politique.fr and http://www.election-politique.fr.

²⁸ Warwick and Druckman, ‘The Portfolio Allocation Paradox’.

²⁹ We assume that the party of the prime minister or regional president is the same as the party of the (final) formateur. We are unaware of any cases in our data that violate this assumption. We made one change to the formateur variable found in the original Warwick and Druckman (‘The Portfolio Allocation Paradox’) dataset. Rather than coding Georges Pompidou as non-partisan, we coded him as being affiliated with the Gaullist party. Although Pompidou was not a member of the National Assembly when he became prime minister, he was clearly linked with the Gaullist Party, was publicly recognized as the de facto party leader from 1964–5, and openly ran as a Gaullist presidential candidate in 1969. We should note that our results are actually stronger if we keep to the original coding of the formateur variable.

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