Standing apart and sitting together: Enforcing coalition agreements in multiparty systems

Abstract.  One of the most obvious questions to be asked about coalition governments is what these governments do, but this question has received little systematic attention from coalition researchers. A key element of coalition governance that may inform our empirical knowledge of the actions of government – their origin, organization and results – is coalition agreements. Party leaders negotiating a new government invest time in writing coalition agreements, and they do this because they expect beneficial effects: more efficiency in coalition policy making, and more peace in the government. Written coalition agreements are considered to reduce uncertainty and mistrust, and this is why they have become institutionalized in countries with coalition governments. This article presents an approach to the comparative study of coalition conflicts as they emerge during government formation, the management of this conflict through drafting coalition agreements and the effects of this during coalition life. The article sets out a number of expectations about the effects of types of deals that parties make; and asks what types of conflict management are most effective and what are the conditions for enforcement – structural and strategic? In recent comparative work, the features of coalition agreements and mechanisms of coalition governance in Western Europe have received attention. This article sets out, with empirical material, how further comparative research on coalition governance may be developed.     

Making words count: Coalition agreements and cabinet management

The cabinet is a central actor in policy making in parliamentary systems. Yet, relatively little is known about how coalition cabinets operate. The delegation of decision‐making authority to ministers invites policy drift, which threatens the cohesiveness of the cabinet's policy programme. Cabinets employ a variety of methods to contain policy drift. The writing of coalition agreements is among the major tools, but there are others, including limiting ministerial autonomy and the use of junior ministers to shadow ministers. The present study demonstrates that coalition agreements are written to contain policy drift and that it is directly related to the degree of hierarchy in the cabinet. It studies the factors that affect the likelihood of a coalition agreement being written and how extensive they are, if written. Among these are the ideological diversity found in the cabinet, the use of alternative methods for controlling ministers and the complexity of the bargaining situation.     

The Scottish Liberal Democrats

As the junior members of the two Scottish coalition or partnership governments (1999–2003 and 2003–7), the Liberal Democrats have had a major impact on post-devolution public policy in Scotland. Contrary to expectations, their participation as junior partners in a coalition government has enhanced rather than damaged their electoral prospects. The party's success in coalition reflects the electoral and policy compatibilities between them and Labour, the availability of increased public spending to fund their demands, their use of specific policy agreements and effective election campaign tactics. Under their new leader, Nicol Stephen, they have sought greater distance from Labour and located themselves between Labour and the Scottish Nationalist Party. Looking forward to the 2007 election, the declining Labour vote and probable SNP gains mean that the Liberal Democrats are likely this time to have a choice between joining a Labour-led or forming a non-Labour coalition.     

How voters' perceptions of junior coalition partners depend on the prime minister's position

Recent studies document that voters infer parties' left‐right policy agreement based on governing coalition arrangements. This article extends this research to present theoretical and empirical evidence that European citizens update their perceptions of junior coalition partners' left‐right policies to reflect the policies of the prime minister's party, but that citizens do not reciprocally project junior coalition partners' policies onto the prime minister's party. These findings illuminate the simple rules that citizens employ to infer parties' policy positions, broaden understanding of how citizens perceive coalition governance and imply that ‘niche’ parties, whose electoral appeal depends upon maintaining a distinctive policy profile, assume electoral risks when they enter government.     

Parliamentary questions as a control mechanism in coalition governments

This article argues that government parties can use parliamentary questions to monitor coalition partners in order to reduce agency loss through ministerial drift. According to this control logic, government parties have particular incentives to question ministers whose jurisdictions display high policy conflict and high electoral salience and thus hold the prospect of electorally damaging ministerial drift. Multivariate regression analysis of all parliamentary questions in the German Bundestag between 1980 and 2017 supports this hypothesis, showing that cabinet parties address substantially and significantly more questions to ministries held by coalition partners on salient and ideologically divisive issues. This interactive effect does not occur for opposition parties or questions posed to own-party ministers. These findings, as well as the temporal patterns of questioning over the electoral cycle, indicate that control within coalitions is a distinct motivation for questioning ministers that cannot be reduced to existing explanations such as electorally motivated issue competition.     

Indonesia and bilateral trade agreements (BTAs)

Abstract

This paper analyses the perspectives of Indonesian state and non-state actors towards their country's increasing tendency to use bilateral trade agreements (BTAs) as part of its foreign economic policy. Unlike the other original members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Indonesian government has been rather slow in pursuing a BTA policy with non-ASEAN member countries. Nevertheless, due to the proliferation of BTAs in other ASEAN countries' foreign economic policies, it was inevitable that Indonesia would pursue similar agreements with its non-ASEAN major trading partners. Despite this, it remains questionable whether Indonesia's participation in such trade agreements will produce such positive results for Indonesian economy. The attitude of the majority of Indonesian domestic constituents to date remains sceptical to this type of agreement. This is not only because BTAs create specific obligations on a range of issues, from trade and investment regimes, this trade strategy also involves deeper and more comprehensive commitments that those agreed at the multilateral level.     

Stability through control? The influence of coalition agreements on the stability of coalition cabinets

Why do some coalition cabinets terminate early and others run until the end of the legislative term? This article analyses whether coalition agreements lower the risk of early government termination. The main argument is that coalition agreements can increase the stability of coalition cabinets as they lower the probability of intra-cabinet conflict. The theoretical expectations are empirically evaluated on the basis of a newly compiled comprehensive dataset on cabinet duration and control mechanisms in coalition governments. Drawing on event history analysis, the effect of coalition agreements on cabinet duration is tested for 420 coalition cabinets from 1945 until 2015 in 23 Western and Eastern European countries. The results show that the existence and duration of a coalition agreement lower the risk of early government termination. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the interaction between coalition governance and coalition termination.     

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.     

Trying not to lose: The electoral consequences of unilateral reform efforts and the social pact formation process

The existing social pact literature claims that governing parties offer social pact proposals because they anticipate they will receive an electoral benefit from social pact agreements. Yet the available data on social pacts inform us that in a substantial minority of cases social pact proposals fail to become social pact agreements. In an effort to better determine the political calculations made by governments before they propose a social pact, this article examines the effect of implementing reform legislation unilaterally, social pact proposals, social pact proposal failures and social pact agreements on the vote share of government parties in 15 Western European countries between 1981 and 2006. It is found that social pact proposals do not have any electoral consequences for governing parties, unilateral legislation and social pact proposal failures reduce the vote share of governing parties, and social pact agreements provide an electoral benefit to parties in minority governments only. These findings suggest that governing parties propose social pacts in a good faith effort to complete a social pact agreement; and that such an agreement is not a way for these parties to gain votes, but to avoid the electoral punishment associated with enacting unpopular reforms unilaterally.     

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.     

Parties on the Chain of Federalism: Position-Taking and Multi-level Party Competition in Germany

Germany’s federalism imposes significant constraints on sub-national parties. They cannot enact their ambitious policy agenda as most legislative powers are concentrated at the federal level. This article demonstrates how sub-national parties use position-taking strategies to escape these constraints. By position-taking, parties try to induce regional voters and interest groups to judge them for what they stand for instead of blaming them for the policies they cannot deliver. This argument is illustrated empirically by analysing all 1,715 announcements of legislative initiatives in the Bundesrat in 562 electoral manifestos and coalition agreements that were published during all 92 regional elections since 1990 and all 1,619 Land bills from the period between 1972 and 2013. It is shown that regional parties and governments that are in opposition at the federal level announce and submit significantly more legislative initiatives that aim at changing federal policies.     

The Government Agenda in Parliamentary Democracies

Lawmaking is a challenge for coalition governments because it inherently demands cooperation and compromise by parties with divergent policy goals. The jurisdictional system of cabinet government exacerbates the problem by providing parties the means to undermine the coalition bargain in the pursuit of their own policy interests. In this article, I explore whether arrangements that allow partners to police one another induce compromise on one of the most important decisions taken by a government—the organization of the policy agenda. In an analysis of original data on the timing and policy content of over 800 government bills from four European democracies, I show that coalition governments pursue a largely "accommodative" agenda. Policy initiatives dealing with issues that are more attractive to all partners in the coalition are likely to be given priority on the agenda, while those dealing with relatively unattractive issues are likely to be postponed .     

Negotiating climate legislation: Policy path dependence and coalition stabilization

This article investigates the nature of policy path dependence through analysis of climate policy formation in the United States. In 2008 the US Congress attempted to pass the Lieberman–Warner bill, a comprehensive climate and energy package that would have capped greenhouse emissions and established a nationwide cap and trade program. In the same year, California successfully enacted the Global Warming Solutions Act. This article explores the circumstances of both cases and raises the question of why legislation at the state level was successful and took such a divergent form from legislation at the federal level. The divergence of these cases is used to highlight the nature of coalition formation and policy path dependence in the legislative process. Explanations of policy tend to gravitate toward either the generalizability of game theoretic approaches or the empirical depth of case studies. This article suggests a combined approach that uses case studies to analyze the positions and motivations of actors and to then model policy development over time. The approach examines policy through the formation and negotiation of policy coalitions. Drawing on the Advocacy Coalition Framework and omnibus analysis, the approach expands these coalition theories first by analysing legislative development at the interface of legislators and constituent interest groups, and second by adding temporal dimension to the analysis. The findings suggest that policy is path dependent in that it is negotiated between coalitions that in turn create stability in the policy process and insulate policy fields from external shocks. Policy path dependence suggests that theory alone is insufficient to predict policy outcomes; policy results depend strongly on prior policy efforts, historically and socially contingent coalitions, and the resulting framing of policy possibilities.     

Who gets what in coalition governments? Predictors of portfolio allocation in parliamentary democracies

Ministerial portfolios are the most obvious payoffs for parties entering a governing coalition in parliamentary democracies. This renders the bargaining over portfolios an important phase of the government formation process. The question of ‘who gets what, and why?’ in terms of ministerial remits has not yet received much attention by coalition or party scholars. This article focuses on this qualitative aspect of portfolio allocation and uses a new comparative dataset to evaluate a number of hypotheses that can be drawn from the literature. The main hypothesis is that parties which, in their election manifestos, emphasise themes corresponding to the policy remit of specific cabinet portfolios are more likely to obtain control over these portfolios. The results show that policy saliency is indeed an important predictor of portfolio allocation in postwar Western European parliamentary democracies.     

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.     

Bargaining in legislatures,portfolio allocation,and the electoral costs of governing

What motivates political parties in the legislative arena? Existing legislative bargaining models stress parties’ office and policy motivations. A particularly important question concerns how parties in coalition government agree the distribution of cabinet seats. This article adds to the portfolio allocation literature by suggesting that future electoral considerations affect bargaining over the allocation of cabinet seats in multi-party cabinets. Some parties are penalised by voters for participating in government, increasing the attractiveness of staying in opposition. This ‘cost of governing’ shifts their seat reservation price – the minimum cabinet seats demanded in return for joining the coalition. Results of a randomised survey experiment of Irish legislators support our expectation, demonstrating that political elites are sensitive to future electoral losses when contemplating the distribution of cabinet seats. This research advances our understanding of how parties’ behaviour between elections is influenced by anticipation of voters’ reactions.     

Does anybody notice? How policy positions of coalition parties are perceived by voters

Does governing in coalitions affect how coalition parties’ policy positions are perceived by voters? In this article, the authors seek to understand the relationship between parties’ participation in coalition governments and their perception by voters. Policy positions are an important instrument through which parties compete for the support of voters. However, it is unclear to what extent voters can correctly perceive the positions of parties when they govern together with other coalition partners. It is argued here that because of the blurred lines of responsibility in multiparty cabinets, it is difficult for voters to correctly perceive the positions of coalition parties. What is more, it is expected that the internal functioning of coalition cabinets affects the extent to which coalition parties struggle to get their message out to voters. It is hypothesized in the article that intra‐cabinet conflict is negatively related to misperception. To test their theoretical expectations, the authors combine data on the left‐right policy positions of political parties from the Comparative Manifestos Project with data on how these positions are perceived by voters gathered from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems from 1996 to 2011. The findings shed light on the relationship between party competition and coalition governments, and its implications for political representation.     

Parties’ policy adjustments in response to changes in issue saliency

Abstract

A number of studies have investigated when parties change their policy positions. However, this growing body of research has had limited interaction with the literature on issue competition. To bring these two perspectives together, this article investigates how and when parties adjust their respective policy positions on immigration, the environment and the welfare state. In the article it is argued that especially large parties in electoral terms adjust their policy positions on specific issues in response to changes in the party system saliency of these issues. When the other parties increase their focus on a given issue, large parties adjust their position in the direction preferred by a majority of the voters. In the article this argument is investigated empirically, based on CMP data from 18 West European countries from 1980 to 2014. The findings largely support the argument and show a strong potential for further integration of the two dominant perspectives on party competition.     

Sharing the Rewards,Dividing the Costs? The Electoral Consequences of Social Pacts and Legislative Reform in Western Europe

Do electoral pressures provide an explanation for why governments offer pacts to unions and employers rather than acting through legislation when faced with the need to pass potentially unpopular reforms to welfare policies, wages, and labour markets? This article addresses that question by analysing whether governments’ pursuit of pacts affects their vote share and increases the probability that they gain re-election for 16 West European countries between 1980 and 2012. It is found that the presence of social pacts has a significant and positive effect on incumbents’ vote shares at the next election and also results in a higher probability of re-election. These results are conditioned by government type: While all types of governments benefit electorally from pacts, the electoral penalties from the pursuit of unilateral legislation on policy reforms harm single-party majorities the most, minority governments moderately, and coalition majorities the least.     

Electoral entry and success of ethnic minority parties in central and eastern Europe: A hierarchical selection model

The paper examines determinants of electoral entry and success of ethnic minority parties in central and eastern Europe. The application of a hierarchical selection model shows that the strategic entry of minority parties depends on their expected electoral success due both to observed and unobserved factors. Drawing on formal models of electoral entry, the electoral success of new (or niche) parties is expected to be influenced by the costs of entry (determined by electoral thresholds) and the potential for electoral support. The latter depends on the reactions of political competitors and electoral demand, measured here as the size of ethnic groups and the saliency of ethnic issues. In line with these expectations, parties only run if they can expect electoral support sufficient to pass the electoral threshold. This finding would have been overlooked by a naïve model of electoral success which does not take self-selection into account.