Many great advances in social science would not have been possible without combining substantive inquiries with methodological advancements. This encouraging approach continues with the publication of de Marchi and Laver’s book. In their enlightening work, the authors tackle the task of explaining and predicting government formation from a computational perspective. In a high-dimensional policy space, as they convincingly argue, decision-makers adopt a functional logic, guided by heuristics, through trial and error. In that light, the canonical formal models, equipped with simplified deductive reasoning and fully strategic calculation, are sometimes insufficient for capturing the reality of coalition governance in parliamentary democracies.

By developing computational models covering all major stages of coalition governance, de Marchi and Laver seek to advance our understanding of the surprisingly stable nature of government formation and factors that may lead to its vanishment. The first chapter of the book puts front and center the concept of the governance cycle, which involves three interconnected processes of election, government formation, and government survival. Because of the complexity of the processes, the authors contend that politicians are only “functionally” rational in the sense that they use heuristics rather than perfect form