Back H., Debus M., Muller J. and Back H. Regional government formation in varying multilevel contexts: a comparison of eight European countries, Regional Studies. Although governance in multilevel settings has become a prominent research field in political science, there are few comparative studies that focus on explaining sub-national coalition outcomes in such settings. This paper sets out to study regional government formation in eight European countries and it builds on a dataset that covers information on the policy preferences of parties drawn from regional election manifestos. The results show that parties at the regional level are likely to form congruent coalitions, that is, copying' the patterns of national government formation, and that they are more likely to do so in specific regional contexts.