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Link to publication in University of Groningen/UMCG research database Citation for published version (APA): Thomson, R. (2001). The programme to policy linkage: The fulfilment of election pledges on socioeconomic policy in the Netherlands, 1986-1998. European Journal of Political Research, 40(2), 171-197. DOI: 10.1007 Copyright Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons).Take-down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.Downloaded from the University of Groningen/UMCG research database (Pure): http://www.rug.nl/research/portal. For technical reasons the number of authors shown on this cover page is limited to 10 maximum. 171The programme to policy linkage: The fulfilment of election pledges on socio-economic policy in the Netherlands, 1986-1998 ROBERT THOMSON University of Groningen, Groningen, The NetherlandsAbstract. To what extent are the contents of party election programmes congruent with subsequent government policy actions? Existing research on the fulfilment of pre-election pledges focuses on systems of government in which executives formed by a single parties are the norm. This study extends this research to coalition systems of government. Specific policy proposals made by the main Dutch parties in their recent election programmes are identified and compared with subsequent government policy actions. Hypotheses about the conditions under which pledges are more likely to be acted upon are formulated and tested. Although clear linkages between election programmes and subsequent policies are found, pledges made by prospective coalition parties in the Netherlands are less likely to be acted upon than those made by prospective governing parties in the United Kingdom. Prominent features of cabinet government, such as the allocation of ministerial portfolios and the coalition policy agreement, are found to influence the likelihood of pledges being fulfilled. In addition, consensus between parties is also found to increase the likelihood of government actions responding to election pledges.

What impact does the negotiation stage prior to the adoption of international agreements have on the subsequent implementation stage? We address this question by examining the linkages between decision making on European Union directives and any subsequent infringements and delays in national transposition. We formulate a preference-based explanation of failures to comply, which focuses on states' incentives to deviate and the amount of discretion granted to states. This is compared with state-based explanations that focus on country-specific characteristics. Infringements are more likely when states disagree with the content of directives and the directives provide them with little discretion. Granting discretion to member states, however, tends to lead to longer delays in transposition. We find no evidence of country-specific effects.

How does the EU resolve controversy when making laws that affect citizens? How has the EU been affected by the recent enlargements that brought its membership to a diverse group of twenty-seven countries? This book answers these questions with analyses of the EU's legislative system that include the roles played by the European Commission, European Parliament and member states' national governments in the Council of Ministers. Robert Thomson examines more than 300 controversial issues in the EU from the past decade and describes many cases of controversial decision-making as well as rigorous comparative analyses. The analyses test competing expectations regarding key aspects of the political system, including the policy demands made by different institutions and member states, the distributions of power among the institutions and member states, and the contents of decision outcomes. These analyses are also highly relevant to the EU's democratic deficit and various reform proposals.

This study describes and explains states' bargaining success in legislative decision-making in the European Union. We measure bargaining success by the congruence between decision outcomes and states' policy positions on a wide range of controversies. We develop and test expectations about variation in states' bargaining success from models of bargaining and legislative procedures. The analyses are based on a newly updated dataset on legislative decision-making that covers the period before and after the 2004 enlargement. The main descriptive finding is that there are no clear winners and losers among member states when a large number of decision outcomes are considered together. However, on any given issue, states typically differ markedly from each other in their bargaining success. Both bargaining models and procedural models provide insights that explain some of the variation in states' bargaining success