WARWICK, Paul V <br/><br/>
Porfolio Salience and the proportionality of payoffs in Coalition Governments 

 -  2001 
<br/><br/> A fundamental divide has emerged over how portfolio payoffs are distributed among parties in paliamentary coalition. On one side lies very strong empirical evidence that the parties in a governing coalition tend to receive profolios in one-to-one proportion to ghe amount of legislative support they contribute to the coalition, with pwerhaps some slight deviations from proportionality coming at the expense of larger parties that lead coalition negotiations. On the other side of the  debate lies a straem of formal theories that suggests the opposite - that parties in charge of coalition  negotiations ought to be able to tak a disproportiantely large share of porfolio benefits for  temselves. In this artile, we address this disjuncture by re-examining  the empirical connection between legislative seats and portfolio payoffs with the aid of a new and more extensive dataset,  a different method of analysis, and what we see as a more  valid operationalization of the dependent variable. This operationalization involves the inclusion, for the first time, of evidence concerning the importance or salience of the portfolios each party receives, as opposed to just their quantity. The article concludes with an assessment of the implications of ouw findings for the debate over the rewards of coalition membership in parliamentary democracies