When do coalitions do what they promise? Previous research has focused on the extent to which parties implement electoral pledges. In this article, we examine how coalition cabinets fulfil post-electoral legislative agendas. Many coalitions announce programmes identifying bills that they plan to introduce to parliament in the months ahead. Even though coalition parties publicly signal commitment to all such proposals, there is variation in the extent to which cabinets meet their own deadlines. We argue that pledge fulfilment is driven by differences in the divisiveness and salience of legislative initiatives. We test our theoretical expectations based on an empirical analysis of over 500 legislative pledges made by the Polish cabinet between 2008 and 2011. Our results confirm that pledges dealing with less divisive and more salient issues are likely to be fulfilled with less delay than those dealing with more divisive and less important issues.

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When are minority cabinets effective? We study the extent to which minority cabinets demonstrate legislative reliability, that is, introduce to parliament the bills they have announced in their legislative agendas. We test hypotheses drawn from two theories of minority government effectiveness: the positional agenda power theory which emphasizes the central location of the minority cabinet in the policy space and the ideological proximity theory which stresses the importance of the ideological closeness of opposition parties to the government. In an analysis of over 1600 bills announced by Danish and Swedish minority cabinets in 19 legislative agendas published between 1998 and 2012, we find more support, overall, for the ideological proximity than for the positional agenda power model.

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