No abstract

No abstract

Does the gender of prime ministers and cabinet ministers influence cabinet duration? We argue that the risk for early termination of cabinets decreases with women's presence in the executive. As scholars of social psychology indicate, women apply more consensual and compromise-oriented conflict resolution strategies. Disputes between or within governing parties, which ultimately lead to early termination, should therefore be less likely to emerge and escalate if the government is led by a woman or includes numerous female members. To test this rationale, we analyse a newly compiled, comprehensive dataset covering 676 governments in 27 European countries between 1945 and 2018 by relying on event history analysis. The results suggest that cabinets with a higher proportion of female cabinet members experience a lower risk of early cabinet termination. This article contributes to the study of women as political leaders through additional evidence for the gendered nature of leadership styles.

Previous research found that coalition partners do not only control each other within the government, but also use instruments of the legislative arena. While the literature has mainly concentrated on parliamentary scrutiny, much less is known about the power of committee chairs in the policy-making process. Therefore, this paper examines if parties use committee chairs to control their coalition partner. We hypothesize that cross-partisan committee chairs will increase the probability that a legislative proposal is changed by the committee. Our theoretical expectations are tested with the help of a newly compiled, comprehensive data set of committee decisions on legislative proposals from 15 German Bundesländer. The case selection allows us to hold important institutional characteristics constant while increasing the variance of the variables on the government level. Our results confirm that committee chairs act as supervisory body and thus add empirical evidence to our understanding of oversight mechanisms in coalition governance.

When analysing coalition agreements, scholars mostly concentrate on those agreements that are written at the national level. However, there is also a considerable amount of coalition agreements that are written at sub-national levels. This paper analyses the commonalities and differences in coalition agreements in the German multi-level system at the national, regional and local level. From a legal jurisdiction perspective, one would expect that there are major differences across political levels in the topics covered in the agreements. From a multi-level governance perspective, however, one would additionally expect that government parties also devote their attention to policy domains that lie outside their realm of legislative decision-making. We take Germany as a prime example for a political system characterized by joint decision-making authorities within cooperative federalism. Combining data from the Political Documents Archive (www.polidoc.net) with newly data from the Local Manifesto Project (LMP; www.localpartymanifestos.de), we analyse nearly 200 coalition agreements at the national, regional and local level in Germany by applying quantitative text analysis techniques. The empirical results show that governing parties mostly talk about the policy areas they are legally responsible for. However, particularly local and regional governing parties also address issues that are primarily part of federal jurisdiction.