Coalition agreement and party mandate: How coalition agreements constrain the ministers

Abstract

In coalition government, the relationship between parties and ministers is one of double delegation: from the party to the minister and from the coalition of parties to the individual minister. On the basis of principal-agent theory, I argue that a coalition agreement is a tool used by coalition parties to reduce agency loss when delegating to ministers. In six governments in Belgium, Italy and The Netherlands, I show that: a majority of the pledges were transferred into cabinet decision, a majority of cabinet decisions were effectively constrained by the coalition agreement and that one third of cabinet decisions had been precisely defined beforehand in the document. Interestingly, the length of the coalition agreement, the entry of party leaders to government and the number of ministers participating in the negotiations do not seem to have had a significant influence on the above two measurements.

Inter-Party Conflict Management in Coalition Governments: Analyzing the Role of Coalition Agreements in Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands

“…Once in power, ministers would then prefer to avoid appearing being unreliable and disloyal, in order to be renewed in their functions and avoid continuous blaming by their peers. These recent findings are related to the literature on agreements and credible commitment, which argues that actors have incentives to bind themselves to common intentions even if this reduces their leeway in policy making [8]. In other words, if parties spend time and effort making deals over policy issues, some of which may be intensely disputed, they are likely to show a degree of commitment when these deals are on the governmental agenda.…”

“…Interviews with (former) ministers also indicate that the reduction of conflict sources and the need to build trust among partners are the main rationales for drafting a coalition agreement. When mistrust is high, agreements become more comprehensive and contain more points on which parties took divergent positions in the election campaign [8]. Another finding is that deals in coalition agreements facilitate and ease decision making [8,11,12], and have a positive effect on the duration of governments [20].…”

“…For example, it has been demonstrated that coalition agreements are not only quite long and comprehensive (and are getting even longer) [4][5][6] but also that they contain most of the substance of the government agenda [7][8][9] and reduce the likelihood of inter-party conflict during the government's term in office [8,[10][11][12]. This empirical work, however, is still very limited in scope and often is confined to two small countries (Belgium, the Netherlands) in which coalitions are composed of parties of similar size that have a long tradition of drafting coalition agreements.…”

Multiparty government and economic policy-making

“…While we thus expect comprehensive coalition agreements potentially to be important for government policy, they are no panacea (Moury 2011;Timmermans 2006). Even when supported by the conditions detailed above, they remain incomplete contracts (Williamson 1979;Salanié 2005).…”

coalition governance and foreign policy decision-making

“…To this purpose, coalition governments can rely on a range of ex ante and ex post control mechanisms which allow coalition partners to keep tabs on each other. Chief among these mechanisms are binding coalition agreements (Timmermans, 2006;Moury, 2010); divided portfolios in which one or more junior ministers come from a different coalition partner than the cabinet minister (Thies, 2001;Verzichelli, 2008); the shadowing of departments by parliamentary committees which are chaired by other coalition partners than the party holding the respective ministry (Martin and Vanberg, 2004;Carroll and Cox, 2012); as well as high-level coalition committees and cross-departmental policy making bodies in which all coalition partners are equally represented (Kaarbo, 1996). Also, the policy discretion of the foreign ministry may be constrained by the powers and competences of the Prime Minister in foreign affairs.…”