Coalition contracts in parliamentary democracies (original) (raw)

Coalition agreements are important policy platforms or “contracts” that crucially determine governance and policy-making during the legislative term in parliamentary democracies. However, we know remarkably little about their content. Importantly, while coalition partners settle some policy issues in great detail, prescribing a detailed policy agenda in order to avoid “ministerial drift”, other issues are hardly mentioned, leaving ample room of maneuver for coalition parties. We seek to explain this important puzzle by shedding light on why the coverage of policy issues in coalition agreements varies so extensively. We argue that ideological conflict between coalition partners positively affects issue attention as parties have stronger incentives to negotiate a detailed policy agenda that constrains their coalition partners when inter-party conflict is high. However, we expect that this effect is conditioned by preference tangentiality among the partners, that is, it depends on whether parties care about the same policy issues or not. The higher the tangentiality (the lower the preference overlap), the smaller the positive effect of cabinet conflict. Our theoretical expectations are tested drawing on a new comparative dataset, generated by a comprehensive content analysis of 166 agreements in 20 West and East European countries from 1945 until 2015. Using this unique dataset, we find support for both of our hypotheses, which suggests that parties draft agreements to limit “ministerial drift”.

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