Abstract
One of the most important decisions coalition partners make when forming a government is the division of ministries. Ministerial portfolios provide the party in charge with considerable informational and agenda-setting advantages, which parties can use to shape policies according to their preferences. Oversight mechanisms in parliaments play a central role in mitigating ministerial policy discretion, allowing coalition partners to control each other even though power has been delegated to individual ministers. However, we know relatively little about how such mechanisms influence the agenda-setting and gatekeeping powers of ministers and how much influence minister parties have on policy output relative to the government as a whole in different institutional settings. We fill this gap by analyzing original data on over 2000 important social and economic policy reform measures adopted in nine Western European countries over 20 years, based on a coding of more than 1200 country reports issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). We find that parliaments with strong oversight powers constrain the agenda-setting capacity of minister parties but have limited impact on their gatekeeping capacity. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of policy-making and democratic accountability.
Highlights
How important are ministerial portfolios for policy influence in coalition settings? During the government formation process in Germany in 2017, Angela Merkel, the leader of the formateur party – Christian Democratic Union (CDU) – was accused of making ‘painful concessions to form new government’ (Spiegel, 2018, see Nasr, 2018)
While we know that such control mechanisms are widely used, we do not have a good understanding of how successful they are and how important ministerial portfolios are for party influence on government policy output. We investigate this question by analyzing original data on over 2000 important social and economic reform measures passed by coalition governments in nine Western European countries between 1985 and 2005, which we collected by coding more than 1200 country reports by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
We suggest that this focus allows us to disclose to what extent the agenda-setting and gatekeeping powers of ministers are constrained by the coalition partners in different institutional settings
Summary
How important are ministerial portfolios for policy influence in coalition settings? During the government formation process in Germany in 2017, Angela Merkel, the leader of the formateur party – Christian Democratic Union (CDU) – was accused of making ‘painful concessions to form new government’ (Spiegel, 2018, see Nasr, 2018). We identify two ways in which parliamentary oversight helps coalition partners constrain ministerial agenda-setting power; indirectly – ministers anticipate scrutiny and the associated costs and refrain from introducing desired but highly contested policies; and directly – coalition partners use committee’s policy expertise to identify feasible policy issues which were omitted in the ministerial proposal and bring these in through bill amendments, by demanding from the responsible minister to propose these or by drafting new proposals on their own Both ways should lead to a weaker systematic relationship between the number of government policies and the alternation of ministerial preferences. We expect that when coalitions operate in parliaments with strong (weak) legislative oversight mechanisms, in particular, where coalition partners can gather policy-specific information, scrutinize and amend ministerial proposals, responsible ministers will have a weaker (stronger) impact on the policy output of governments. We hypothesize that: Hypothesis 4 (Coalition Compromise and Institutional Context): The impact of coalition alternation on the number of reform measures increases with greater legislative policing strength
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