Abstract
A legislature's ability to engage in executive oversight is believed to derive largely from its committee system. Strong parliamentary committees, for example, allow parties in multiparty government to keep tabs on each other. This paper suggests the instrument of parliamentary questions as an alternative parliamentary vehicle for coalition parties to monitor their partners. Questions force ministers to reveal information concerning their legislative and extra-legislative activities, providing coalition members unique insights into their partners’ behaviour. To test our argument, we build and analyse a new dataset of parliamentary questions in the British House of Commons covering the 2010-15 coalition. As expected, government MPs ask more questions of ministries held by the other party, and especially target questions to ministries where coalition parties are furthest apart ideologically. Legislatures conventionally considered weak due to the lack of strong committees may nevertheless play an important role in policing the bargain and managing coalition government.
Highlights
A legislature’s ability to engage in oversight of the executive is believed to derive largely from its committee system
Because parliamentary questions (PQs) have the advantage of being recorded in a number of legislatures, it is possible to explore the degree to which patterns in questioning within parliaments with coalition governments align with the allocation of ministerial portfolios between parties
Coalition governments require otherwise competitive political parties to compromise on their policy preferences, with individual ministers charged with implementing the coalition compromise
Summary
Coalition government requires governing parties to cooperate over the production and implementation of public policy. It falls to individual cabinet ministers to implement the coalition agreement. A coalition government delegates implementation of the agreed-upon policies to cabinet members of their own party, and to their coalition partners ministers (Thies 2001). In a seminal contribution, Martin and Vanberg (2011) suggest that the legislative process serves as a structural solution to the keeping tabs problem inherent to coalition government. Parliaments with strong committees, Martin and Vanberg (2011) suggest, are uniquely positioned to police coalition agreements, just as committees provide an informational advantage in legislatures more generally (Krehbiel 1991). That parties strategically assign committee chairs to keep tabs on their coalition partners provides further evidence of the committee structures central position in intracoalition monitoring (Carroll and Cox 2012). We propose that other legislative instruments may serve as a mechanism for parties in coalition government to keep tabs on each other
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