Prof. Dr. Thomas König
Thomas König (* February 2, 1961 in Münster) has been researching and teaching at the University of Mannheim since 2007, following positions at the Universities of Konstanz, Saarbrücken, Speyer, Stanford, and Washington University in St. Louis. Following his doctorate, he was a Marie Curie Fellow of the European Union, a Heisenberg Fellow of the German Research Foundation (DFG), a Karl Deutsch Honorary Professor at the Social Science Center Berlin (WZB), and a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Washington University in St. Louis.
His evidence-based research is a defining feature of the internationally oriented Mannheim analytical-empirical school of political science. Applied to European democracies and the European Union, he examines the impact of constitutions, institutions, and laws on the interactions between political leaders, parties, interest groups, voters, and public opinion.
From 2010 to 2022, he was the spokesperson for the interdisciplinary Collaborative Research Center "Political Economy of Reforms" of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Beitrag
Existing studies of coalition governance have largely studied the spatial dimension of coalition parties‘ preferences and overlooked the temporal dimension of coalition governance, which representative democracy limits to the periods of a term. This temporal dimension has important implications for the dynamics of coalition governance, in which coalition parties learn from their joint policy-making experiences about the type of their partnership over time. This presentation will introduce into a new perspective on Pro Tempore of coalition governance, introducing a learning theory and cyclical analysis for the study of the dynamics of joint policy-making in coalition governance. It distinguishes between a portfolio- and partisan learning model for the timing of the common policy agenda, for which ministerial office-holders are responsible in their jurisdiction. Depending on their learning experiences, they decide about the timing of the common policy agenda, which affects coalition effectiveness, stability and satisfaction with coalition governance.