A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing or a Gift from Heaven? Left-Left Coalitions in Comparative Perspective

Communist, post-Communist and radical socialist political parties have recently been brought into the coalition equation in a number of democratic states. This article seeks to develop and apply an analytical framework suitable for understanding under what conditions this occurs. It concentrates primarily on coalition formation at the sub-state level between social democratic parties and competitors to their ideological left. The framework is applied in the German and Spanish cases. The article concludes that there do indeed appear to be optimal sets of conditions facilitating the creation of left-left coalitions.