Coalition

A coalition is a group of actors that coordinate their behavior in a limited and temporary fashion to achieve a common goal. As a form of goal-oriented political cooperation, a coalition can be contrasted with an alliance and a network. An alliance suggests a robust partnership of at least medium-term duration, as compared with the more fleeting coalition. Alternatively, a network is a more informal but potentially broader grouping, suggesting more ad-hoc cooperation than in a coalition but over a wider array of concerns. In coalitions, alliances, and networks, the actors involved—whether states in wartime, political parties in government, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in political movements—each retain its distinctive identity and interests, but the coalition remains the most ephemeral of the three. For each, however, the purpose of collaboration is ultimately the same: to aggregate actors' strengths to achieve some shared goal that none could achieve individually.

Coalitions generally form from the voluntary accession of their constituent members. However, because actors rarely have the same intensity of interests with regard to the given goal or goals, some actors may provide rewards or threats to induce others to participate. As such, differences in power among potential and actual coalition members matter, both in determining who becomes a member of the coalition and, after the coalition forms, who has the most influence in determining agendas, strategies, and the like. For instance, in prosecuting the war to oust Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the international coalition may have been a “coalition of the willing” or a “coalition of the coerced and the bribed,” but either way, it was not a coalition of the equal—the United States was clearly leading the effort. As this example suggests, coalitions' internal structures often reproduce the structure of relationships among the actors more generally, though the cooperative nature of the endeavor may constrain the overt exercise of power within the coalition.

Although all coalitions tend to be temporary, disbanding after a goal has been achieved (or proven unachievable given the circumstances), some may persist longer than others. Duration may be a function of power relationships: a dominant coalition member or set of members may be able to either dissolve the coalition or maintain ongoing adherence. However, the degree of correspondence of interests among coalition members also affects duration. Participation over time in a coalition may cause individual members to perceive a broader set of shared interests and beliefs among them, leading them to transform the coalition into a more integrated political community (in which case it is no longer merely a coalition). For instance, repeated coordination in the great conflicts of the twentieth century transformed what was initially a loose entente among the Western democracies into a broader and deeper “Atlantic Community.” Thus, while any one of a number of factors might determine whether coalitions actually achieve their goals, as much as anything it is the relative breadth and depth of shared interests that determine their capacity to persist and perhaps pursue other common goals.