The programme to policy linkage: The fulfilment of election pledges on socio-economic policy in the Netherlands, 1986–1998

To what extent are the contents of party election programmes congruent with subsequent government policy actions? Existing research on the fulfilment of pre-election pledges focuses on systems of government in which executives formed by a single parties are the norm. This study extends this research to coalition systems of government. Specific policy proposals made by the main Dutch parties in their recent election programmes are identified and compared with subsequent government policy actions. Hypotheses about the conditions under which pledges are more likely to be acted upon are formulated and tested. Although clear linkages between election programmes and subsequent policies are found, pledges made by prospective coalition parties in the Netherlands are less likely to be acted upon than those made by prospective governing parties in the United Kingdom. Prominent features of cabinet government, such as the allocation of ministerial portfolios and the coalition policy agreement, are found to influence the likelihood of pledges being fulfilled. In addition, consensus between parties is also found to increase the likelihood of government actions responding to election pledges.

     

The programme to policy linkage: The fulfilment of election pledges on socio–economic policy in The Netherlands, 1986–1998

To what extent are the contents of party election programmes congruent with subsequent government policy actions? Existing research on the fulfilment of pre–election pledges focuses on systems of government in which executives formed by a single parties are the norm. This study extends this research to coalition systems of government. Specific policy proposals made by the main Dutch parties in their recent election programmes are identified and compared with subsequent government policy actions. Hypotheses about the conditions under which pledges are more likely to be acted upon are formulated and tested. Although clear linkages between election programmes and subsequent policies are found, pledges made by prospective coalition parties in the Netherlands are less likely to be acted upon than those made by prospective governing parties in the United Kingdom. Prominent features of cabinet government, such as the allocation of ministerial portfolios and the coalition policy agreement, are found to influence the likelihood of pledges being fulfilled. In addition, consensus between parties is also found to increase the likelihood of government actions responding to election pledges.     

Pre-electoral commitments and government formation

Recent studies show that pre-electoral commitments and the ideological distance between parties influence government formation. But do pre-electoral pacts or rejections of party combinations really have an independent impact on the outcome of the government formation game? Which policy areas matter when parties agree to build a coalition? This paper addresses these questions by applying a dataset that includes information on preferred/rejected coalition partners and the policy-area specific programmatic heterogeneity of all potential coalitions. The results show that pre-electoral commitments have a significant impact on government formation after controlling for endogeneity problems. There is also evidence that not only diversity in economic issues determines the partisan composition of governments.     

The Fulfillment of Parties’ Election Pledges: A Comparative Study on the Impact of Power Sharing

Why are some parties more likely than others to keep the promises they made during previous election campaigns? This study provides the first large‐scale comparative analysis of pledge fulfillment with common definitions. We study the fulfillment of over 20,000 pledges made in 57 election campaigns in 12 countries, and our findings challenge the common view of parties as promise breakers. Many parties that enter government executives are highly likely to fulfill their pledges, and significantly more so than parties that do not enter government executives. We explain variation in the fulfillment of governing parties’ pledges by the extent to which parties share power in government. Parties in single‐party executives, both with and without legislative majorities, have the highest fulfillment rates. Within coalition governments, the likelihood of pledge fulfillment is highest when the party receives the chief executive post and when another governing party made a similar pledge.     

When,How and Why Are Junior Coalition Parties Able to Affect a Government's Foreign Policy? A Study of Swedish Coalition Governments 2006–2014

Junior partners in a coalition government are torn between an eagerness to profile themselves, and to show loyalty to the coalition. We investigate when, how and why junior coalition parties affect foreign policy and profile themselves despite demands for national unity. We study two Swedish centre‐right governments in 2006–2010 and 2010–2014. The parties' foreign policy positions in election manifestos are compared to the foreign policy positions presented in the joint Alliance manifesto and yearly government declarations. An explorative analysis of possible explanations for junior parties' influence is based on elite interviews. The results indicate that junior coalition parties might influence the foreign policy in symbolic value related issues, but less so in issues with real policy implications. Our analysis reveals the importance of the leading member of the coalition and how junior parties converge over time towards the position of the senior coalition member.     

Coalition Policy-Making under Constraints: Examining the Role of Preferences and Institutions

While much has been written about the formation and termination of coalitions, comparatively little attention has been paid to the policy output of multiparty governments. The present study attempts to narrow this research gap by analysing policy-making in three Austrian coalition governments between 1999 and 2008. Drawing on the party mandate literature, a manually coded textual analysis of election manifestos is conducted that yields a dataset containing over 1,100 pledges. The fulfilment of these pledges is taken as the dependent variable in a multivariate analysis. The results indicate that institutional determinants (adoption in the coalition agreement, ministerial control, and policy status quo) significantly influence the chances of pledge fulfilment and thus present a powerful predictor of coalition policy output. By contrast, factors related to parties’ preferences (consensus between parties, policy distance, pledge saliency, and majority support in parliament) do not have an impact.     

Partisan politics and stock market performance: The effect of expected government partisanship on stock returns in the 2002 German federal election

Rational partisan theory suggests that firms perform better under right- than left-leaning governments. In the pre-election time, investors should anticipate these effects of government partisanship. This is the first study to investigate such anticipated partisan effects in Germany. Applying conditional volatility models we analyze the impact of expected government partisanship on stock market performance in the 2002 German federal election. Our results show that small-firm stock returns were positively (negatively) linked to the probability of a right- (left-) leaning coalition winning the election. Moreover, we find that volatility increased as the electoral prospects of right-leaning parties improved, while greater electoral uncertainty had a volatility-reducing effect.     

The Company You Keep: How Voters Infer Party Positions on European Integration from Governing Coalition Arrangements

Recent studies document that voters infer parties’ left‐right positions from governing coalition arrangements. We show that citizens extend this coalition‐based heuristic to the European integration dimension and, furthermore, that citizens’ coalition‐based inferences on this issue conflict with alternative measures of party positions derived from election manifestos and expert placements. We also show that citizens’ perceptions of party positions on Europe matter, in that they drive substantial partisan sorting in the electorate. Our findings have implications for parties’ election strategies and for mass‐elite policy linkages.     

Assessing the Impact of Alternative Voting Technologies on Multi-Party Elections: Design Features,Heuristic Processing and Voter Choice

This paper analyzes the influence of alternative voting technologies on electoral outcomes in multi-party systems. Using data from a field experiment conducted during the 2005 legislative election in Argentina, we examine the role of information effects associated with alternative voting devices on the support for the competing parties. We find that differences in the type of information displayed and how it was presented across devices favored some parties to the detriment of others. The impact of voting technologies was found to be larger than in two-party systems, and could lead to changes in election results. We conclude that authorities in countries moving to adopt new voting systems should carefully take the potential partisan advantages induced by different technologies into account when evaluating their implementation.     

Retrospective pledge voting: A comparative study of the electoral consequences of government parties’ pledge fulfilment

Does pledge fulfilment bear any electoral consequences for government parties? While previous research on retrospective voting has largely focused on electoral accountability with respect to the economy, the theoretical framework presented in this study links government parties’ performance to their previous electoral pledges. It is argued that government parties are more likely to be rewarded by voters when they have fulfilled more pledges during the legislative term. Good pledge performance of a party is associated with the ability to maximise policy benefits (accomplishment) and to be a responsible actor that will stick to its promises in the future as well (competence). Analysing data from 69 elections in 14 countries shows that a government party's electoral outcome is affected by its previous pledge performance. A government party that fulfils a higher share of election pledges is more likely to prevent electoral losses. This finding indicates that voters react at the polls to party pledge fulfilment, which highlights the crucial role of promissory representation in democratic regimes. Surprisingly and in contrast with economic voting, there is no evidence that retrospective pledge voting is moderated by clarity of responsibility.     

Voter perceptions of coalition policy positions in multiparty systems

A growing body of research shows how voters consider coalition formation and policy compromises at the post-electoral stage when making vote choices. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how voters perceive policy positions of coalition governments. Using new survey data from the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES), we study voter perceptions of coalition policy platforms. We find that voters do in general have reasonable expectations of the coalitions' policy positions. However, partisan beliefs and uncertainty affect how voters perceive coalition positions: in addition to projection biases similar to those for individual party placements, partisans of coalition parties tend to align the position of the coalition with their own party's policy position, especially for those coalitions they prefer the most. In contrast, there is no consistent effect of political knowledge on the voters' uncertainty when evaluating coalition policy positions.     

Cracks in the Opposition: Immigration as a Wedge Issue for the Reagan Coalition

The absence of a core means that a majority coalition can never choose a policy that will keep it safe from minority appeals to its pivotal members. In two dimensions, strategic minorities will always be able to offer pivotal voters attractive policy concessions. We argue that this instability of multidimensional politics explains why minorities raise wedge issues and how wedge issues result in partisan realignment in legislative politics. Applying agenda‐constrained ideal point estimation techniques to immigration debates, we show that the Reagan coalition—pro‐business and social conservatives—has been vulnerable on the wedge issue of immigration and that parties have switched their positions on immigration over the last three decades. We use the uncovered set as the best‐fit theoretical solution concept in this legislative environment, to capture the limits of majority rule coalitional possibilities and policy change in the two‐dimensional absence of a core.     

Partisan Sorting and Niche Parties in Europe

Earlier research has concluded that European citizens do not update their Left–Right policy preferences or their party attachments in response to the content of parties’ election manifestos – i.e. partisan sorting is not observed in the mass public in response to shifts in the Left–Right tone of these manifestos. Here we extend this research to analyse whether we observe partisan sorting patterns that correspond with political experts’ perceptions of parties’ Left–Right policy shifts. Given that these experts plausibly consider all pertinent information when estimating parties’ Left–Right orientations – including party elites’ speeches, elite interviews, coalition behaviour, and legislative voting patterns – such a finding would imply that citizens do weigh the wider informational environment when updating their Left–Right orientations and their party support, even if they do not attach great weight to the parties’ policy manifestos. Our analyses provide support for this hypothesis with respect to niche parties, i.e. green, communist, and radical right parties, but not for mainstream parties.     

Expected utility or learned familiarity? The formation of voters' coalition preferences

In most modern parliamentary democracies, it is unlikely that single party governments will be formed, meaning that a voter's preferred party presumably has to share cabinet offices and negotiate policy compromises in a coalition government. This raises the question of how voters evaluate potential (coalition) governments, especially since recent studies have shown that coalition preferences influence voting behaviour. In this paper, we combine theories of voting behaviour, government formation and political learning to derive expectations regarding the factors that may impact voters' coalition preferences. We test our hypotheses by analysing survey data from the German federal and state levels. The results of a mixed logit regression analysis support our arguments: Voters' coalition preferences not only depend on the perceived policy distance between the positions of voters and the most distant party within combinations of parties, but also on predominant patterns of government formation.     

Ideological congruence between party rhetoric and policy-making

Scholars, citizens and journalists alike question whether political parties keep their electoral promises. A growing body of literature provides empirical evidence that parties do indeed keep their electoral pledges. Yet little is known about the congruence between party rhetoric between elections and the policies delivered by them. Given the increasing influence of party rhetoric in the media with respect to voting decisions, it is highly relevant to understand if parties ‘walk like they talk’. The article suggests that due to electoral reasons parties face strong incentives to deliver policy outputs which are congruent to their daily rhetoric. Analysing data on 54 policy outputs on nuclear energy, drafted by 24 parties after the Fukushima accident, the analysis finds overwhelming evidence that parties deliver ideologically congruent policy outputs to their rhetoric (incongruent only in 7.89%). These findings have important implications for our understanding of the linkage between party communication and the masses in modern media democracies.     

Do party supporters accept policy compromises in coalition governments?

Government formation in multi-party systems often requires coalition negotiations and finding common ground among coalition partners. Supporters of parties involved in the government formation process face a trade-off when evaluating such bargaining processes: on the one hand, voters usually prefer seeing their party being in government rather than in opposition; on the other hand, negotiations require coalition compromises that they might dislike. In this paper, we study voters’ willingness to accept policy compromises during government formation processes. We argue that voters’ acceptance of policy compromises depends on both the strength of their party attachment and the importance they assign to the issue at stake during the coalition negotiations. Not giving in on important issues is key, especially for supporters of challenger parties, who hold strong policy preferences on a selected number of issues. To test these expectations, we collected original survey data immediately after the Spanish general election in November 2019. The results show support for the hypothesized effects, shed light on the pressure potential coalition partners face during government formation and help explain the failures of government formation attempts in increasingly polarized societies.     

Coalition Government,Legislative Institutions,and Public Policy in Parliamentary Democracies

Most democracies are governed by coalitions, comprising multiple political parties with conflicting policy positions. The prevalence of these governments poses a significant question: Which parties' electoral commitments are ultimately reflected in government policy? Recent theories have challenged our understanding of multiparty government, arguing that the relative influence of coalition parties depends crucially on institutional context. Specifically, where institutions allow credible enforcement of bargains, policy should reflect a compromise among all governing parties; where such institutions are absent, the preferences of parties controlling the relevant ministries should prevail. Critically, empirical work has thus far failed to provide direct evidence for this conditional relationship. Analyzing changes in social protection policies in 15 parliamentary democracies, we provide the first systematic evidence that the strength of legislative institutions significantly shapes the relative policy influence of coalition parties. Our findings have implications for our understanding of coalition government, policymaking, and electoral responsiveness.     

Is Anybody Listening? Evidence That Voters Do Not Respond to European Parties’ Policy Statements During Elections

Although extensive research analyzes the factors that motivate European parties to shift their policy positions, there is little cross‐national research that analyzes how voters respond to parties’ policy shifts. We report pooled, time‐series analyses of election survey data from several European polities, which suggest that voters do not systematically adjust their perceptions of parties’ positions in response to shifts in parties’ policy statements during election campaigns. We also find no evidence that voters adjust their Left‐Right positions or their partisan loyalties in response to shifts in parties’ campaign‐based policy statements. By contrast, we find that voters do respond to their subjective perceptions of the parties’ positions. Our findings have important implications for party policy strategies and for political representation.     

Three-party competition in parliamentary democracy with proportional representation

This article studies the long-run dynamics of policy choices, government formations, and voting behavior under a parliamentary constitution and proportional representation. I develop an infinite period game where, in each period, voters participate in a proportional representation election, and three farsighted parties bargain over one-dimensional policy programs and government positions. The model incorporates the interaction between elections and coalition bargaining, which is the essence of politics in most parliamentary systems, as well as a dynamic environment of policymaking: a policy once implemented remains in effect until another replaces it. I find a Markov perfect equilibrium in which (1) there is no majority party in any election; (2) election results converge over time to a stable vote distribution; (3) policy outcomes change over time but eventually stay within a set of three points; (4) minimal winning coalitions and minority governments are formed with positive probability and alternate over time.     

Left-right party ideology and government policies: A meta-analysis

Abstract. This paper summarizes how the partisan influence literature assesses the relationship between the left–right party composition of government and policy outputs through a meta–analysis of 693 parameter estimates of the party–policy relationship published in 43 empirical studies. Based on a simplified 'combined tests' meta–analytic technique, we show that the average correlation between the party composition of government and policy outputs is not significantly different from zero. A mutivariate logistic regression analysis examines how support for partisan theory is affected by a subset of mediating factors that can be applied to all the estimates under review. The analysis demonstrates that there are clearly identifiable conditions under which the probability of support for partisan theory can be substantially increased. We conclude that further research is needed on institutional and socio–economic determinants of public policy.