Abstract
In this article, we focus on manifest interparty conflict over policy issues and the role of coalition agreements in solving these conflicts. We present empirical findings on the characteristics of coalition agreements including deals over policy controversy and on inter-party conflict occurring during the lifetime of governments in Germany, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands. We analyze the ways in which parties in government were or were not constrained by written deals over disputed issues. Coalition agreements from all four countries include specific policy deals, one third of which are precisely defined. These policy deals concern both consensual and controversial issues. Our central finding is that, in the case of intra-party conflict, parties almost always fall back on the initial policy deals when these exist. As such, policy statements of the coalition agreement facilitate decision making in each of the countries studied.
Highlights
Parties that join a coalition want to remain visible to the electorate, but once in office they need to compromise with their partners to pass policies
The number of case studies is limited, we expect this approach to be replicable for other coalition governments in the four countries and in a broader set of countries with government coalitions— allowing more analytical generalization beyond the findings we present in this contribution
While we must be cautious in making causal inferences about coalition agreements and policy output, our findings indicate that commitment to deals and substantive decisions in situations of major interparty dispute was more problematic in the Italian coalitions, in particular in the two Center-Left governments that lacked stable majority support
Summary
Parties that join a coalition want to remain visible to the electorate, but once in office they need to compromise with their partners to pass policies. It has been demonstrated that coalition agreements are quite long and comprehensive (and are getting even longer) [4,5,6] and that they contain most of the substance of the government agenda [79] and reduce the likelihood of inter-party conflict during the government's term in office [8,10,11,12] This empirical work, 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. In this way we empirically investigate the possible roles of coalition agreements in a more varied context than has been done in coalition research far
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