Bringing policies back in: Explaining payoff allocation in coalition governments
Final Report Abstract
The goal of this project was to shed light on the question how coalition parties distribute policy payoffs in coalition negotiations. Political parties forming a coalition government join forces for the purpose of entering government, but they pursue different policy objectives and compete for offices. As a result, coalition parties cannot autonomously enact their preferred policies, but instead have to come to an agreement with their partners regarding the policy reforms that should be implemented during the time of office. While there is a large body of research analyzing the allocation of ministerial offices, previous research has largely ignored the question how policies are negotiated in coalition agreements during government formation. This research project has sought to close this gap by providing a comprehensive analysis of policy payoff allocation in coalition governments. In a first step, we have developed a theoretical framework to explain policy payoff allocation in coalition governments. In a second step, a new and unprecedented dataset on the content of coalition agreements was compiled. We collected and coded 229 coalition agreements in 24 countries according drawing on a comprehensive quantitative content analysis. Coalition agreements are an ideal source for the measurement of policy payoffs: Even though these contracts are not legally binding, they define the policy priorities of the coalition government and constrain the behavior of coalition parties in the upcoming term. How can we explain policy payoff allocation in coalition agreements? Our findings suggest that there is a direct link between what parties have promised before the election and what they do once they enter government. The salience of policy issues in parties’ manifestos clearly matters for the attention given to issues in the coalition agreement. Hence, our findings indicate that there is congruence between citizens' interests and the policies advocated by their representatives. This is good news for democracy and political representation as parties adhere to their promises made before elections. However, given that coalition parties cannot single-handedly enact their preferred policies, but instead have to come to an agreement with their coalition partners with regard to what policies are implemented. Accordingly, we find that the positive effect of salience is conditioned by characteristics of coalition cabinets, most importantly party size, cabinet conflict and preference tangentiality. Larger parties are more successful in including their policy priorities into the coalition agreement while conflict and tangentiality decrease the positive effect of issue salience. 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.
Publications
- (2019) Coalition agreements, issue attention, and cabinet governance. Comparative Political Studies 52 (13-14) 1995-2031
Klüver, Heike and Hanna Bäck
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0010414019830726) - “Stability through control? The influence of control mechanisms on the stability of coalition cabinets”, PhD thesis
Krauss, Svenja
- “Stability through control? The influence of coalition agreements on the stability of coalition cabinets” West European Politics
Krauss, Svenja
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2018.1453596)
