Policy-Making in Coalition Governments: The Enactment of Coalition Agreements (COALITIONPOLICY)
Final Report Abstract
Why do coalition agreements (not) enact the promises they have made in coalition agreements? Coalition agreements are negotiated over weeks and sometimes months and lay the ground for the policy agenda of the government. Their publication is typically accompanied by big press conferences and the media reports extensively about their content. In fact, the media frequently uses them as a benchmark to evaluate the performance of the government. Thus, even though the fulfillment of the coalition agreement is publicly monitored, previous case studies have shown that coalition governments often fail to enact their own promises. Given that voters punish governments for not fulfilling their own promises, it is an empirical puzzle why coalition governments not comply with their own commitments that they have made at the beginning of the legislative term. In this project, we have compiled and analyzed the new COALITIONPOLICY Dataset which measures the fulfillment of more than 5'000 policy pledges by 87 coalition governments in 20 Western and Eastern European countries from 2000 to 2015. Based on this newly compiled dataset, we have shown that coalition governments on average only fully implement 50 per cent of the policy commitments made in coalition agreements. We have shown that two factors importantly explain variation in pledge fulfillment, namely the salience of a policy commitment and the divisiveness of a commitment. More specifically, we have shown that pledges that are salient to all coalition parties are more likely to be adopted, but that this effect becomes smaller as intra-cabinet conflict increases. In addition, we have shown that also the timing of pledge fulfillment varies conditional on salience and divisiveness. If an issue area is both contested and salient, policy commitments are not only less likely to be fulfilled, but also less likely to be fulfilled early during the legislative term. The findings have important implications for our understanding of how policy-making in coalition governments work. The results support the collegial model of coalition bargaining according to which policy-making is the result of constant bargaining, monitoring and compromise in the cabinet. Instead of leaving ministers' autonomy in their jurisdiction, coalition parties constantly monitor each other and only push legislative proposals forward that are agreed by their coalition partners. Parties pay close attention to proposals that emerge from ministries they do not control and policy-making thus reflect a set of issue-by-issue compromises made by coalition parties. To the extent that such proposals have not been agreed in the coalition agreement, or if circumstances have changed since then, the formulation of policy proposals to enact the coalition agreement involves intra-coalition negotiations and bargaining. The cabinet approval is far from mere formality as each party wields a de facto veto over all proposals that the cabinet introduces to parliament. The research project will also importantly contribute to a growing infrastructure of data on political processes, contributing to ever-expanding databases that can be used by others for a variety of purposes (see e.g. the Comparative Manifesto Project, the ParlGov database, the Comparative Parliamentary Democracy Data Archive, the European Representative Democracy Data Archive and the Comparative Policy Agendas Database). We used the same party and election identification codes so that our collected data can be easily combined with these existing databases. Upon publication of the first journal articles, we will make all our collected data publicly available on the website of the Principal Investigator and Harvard Dataverse for other scholars and are confident that the collected dataset will be used by a large number of scholars in the field of coalition governments, party competition and legislative politics and that our research project will thus have an additional long-lasting impact on the discipline.
Publications
- Coalition governance and policy-making in multiparty cabinets, Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) Conference, April 2021, Online
Klüver, Heike, Anthea Alberto and Fabio Ellger:
- Putting on the Brakes: Radical Right Parties and Government Formation, European Political Science Association (EPSA) Conference, June 2021, Online
Klüver, Heike, Jae-Jae Spoon and António Valentim
- The electoral consequences of policy-making in coalition governments, Deutsche Vereinigung für Politikwissenschaft Kongress, September 2021, Online
Klüver, Heike, Anthea Alberto and Fabio Ellger
- The electoral implications of minority governance, European Political Science Association (EPSA) Conference, June 2021, Online
Thürk, Maria and Heike Klüver
- The making and breaking of policy promises in coalition government, European Political Science Association (EPSA) Conference, June 2021, Online
Klüver, Heike, Anthea Alberto and Fabio Ellger
- The making and breaking of policy promises in coalition government, Online Workshop of the Comparative Party Pledges Project, December 2021
Klüver, Heike, Anthea Alberto and Fabio Ellger
