Coalition governments are central to many Western liberal democracies, and have been subject to extensive academic analysis. Yet, existing policy-driven theories of coalition formation struggle to explain the inclusion of parties that do not easily fit onto a common policy dimension, and especially parties that do not express positions on the main issue dimension. Addressing this gap, I theorize the role of parties’ group appeals in the process of coalition formation and test it empirically. Specifically, I hypothesize that among non-formateur parties, those with more limited group appeals are more likely to be included in coalitions than parties with more extensive group appeals. I argue that that is so because a more limited group appeal is assumed to lead to more specific demands (for the groups these parties claim to represent) instead of broad-based demands. More limited group appeals make inclusion in coalitions less costly as it is easier to accommodate in a variety of minimum winning connected coalitions. Using a novel dataset of group appeals based on the content analysis of parties’ election manifestos, I examine 92 coalitions in Israel and the Netherlands between 1977 and 2015. The logistic regression analysis results, with parties being the unit of focus, support the hypothesis and show that among non-formateur parties, more limited group appeals increase the likelihood of being included in coalitions. These results highlight the importance of including this variable in our analysis of coalition formation and the value of using different sources to examine parties’ behavior.