As is conventional, we bring this book to a close in the next two chapters by pointing out some directions for future research. The usual way to do this is to throw out a few general ideas in a relatively haphazard manner, some tough and not necessarily very tasty bones for graduate students to get their teeth into. However, we regard one of the great virtues of our approach – indeed its greatest virtue – to be the rich and varied menu of potential applications that it opens up for future research. We do not see these as the boring bits we could not be bothered to chew over ourselves. We see them as the exciting rewards that can be reaped as a result of developing an explicit and we hope realistic model of the government formation process. Accordingly, in this chapter we limit ourselves to three of the most promising potential applications of our approach, and take time to develop them in some detail.

The first application that we consider concerns the interaction of intraparty politics and government formation. We consider the general area of intraparty politics to be one of the most exciting and underdeveloped in the entire literature, since it generates the potential to provide some motivation for the actions of political parties, hitherto unrealistically seen by most theorists as anthropomorphic unitary actors. The second application concerns minority and surplus majority governments. The third and final application of this chapter focuses on administrative reform. Here we raise the prospect of endogenizing the assignment of issues to ministerial portfolios, thereby affecting the very way in which governments go about their business once installed in power.