Abstract
While much has been written about the formation and termination of coalitions, comparatively little attention has been paid to the policy output of multiparty governments. The present study attempts to narrow this research gap by analysing policy-making in three Austrian coalition governments between 1999 and 2008. Drawing on the party mandate literature, a manually coded textual analysis of election manifestos is conducted that yields a dataset containing over 1,100 pledges. The fulfilment of these pledges is taken as the dependent variable in a multivariate analysis. The results indicate that institutional determinants (adoption in the coalition agreement, ministerial control, and policy status quo) significantly influence the chances of pledge fulfilment and thus present a powerful predictor of coalition policy output. By contrast, factors related to parties’ preferences (consensus between parties, policy distance, pledge saliency, and majority support in parliament) do not have an impact.
Highlights
While much has been written about the formation and termination of coalitions, comparatively little attention has been paid to the policy output of multiparty governments
Coalition governments pose a challenge to the direct link between a party’s electoral mandate and the policy output produced by a government
Divergent preferences between coalition parties and the intra-cabinet division of labour among ministerial jurisdictions increase the potential for agency loss in the parliamentary chain of delegation (Müller 2000)
Summary
We put forward two sets of expectations about policy-making in coalition governments. The preference divergence between parties translates into (potential) agency loss due to the need to delegate policy implementation from the cabinet collective to individual ministers whose policy positions may diverge substantially from the coalition average (Andeweg 2000; Müller 2000). Our hypothesis is a very simple transfer of this saliency logic to the level of policy pledges: the more important a specific policy proposal to a party, the more likely it is to be implemented The rationale behind this argument lies in the asymmetric distribution of costs between the parties involved in a coalition government. Consensual proposals between the coalition parties are excluded in the empirical test of H3
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