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Managing Grand Coalitions: Germany 2005–09
Abstract
Grand Coalitions are a specific type of government known in Austria and Germany as the cooperation of the main competing parties in government, rallying behind the governments' vast parliamentary majorities. Grand Coalitions subject their partners to specific challenges in terms of achieving party goals and demands on their policies. This, in turn, increases the demands on coalition governance. The article analyses how the Grand Coalition under Angela Merkel has coped with the problems of coalition management. In so doing it compares its management mechanisms with those employed by the German Grand Coalition of the 1960s and the many Austrian cabinets of this type. It measures the level of intra-coalition conflict and shows how coalition management instruments have been employed to mange or resolve conflict. Specifically, it shows that the coalition committee was summoned more frequently when conflict levels were up and that most of the Grand Coalition's key decisions had already been contained in the coalition agreement. Yet not all plans were fully implemented. Overall the Grand Coalition enacted important reforms. While failing to meet the high expectations a Grand Coalition raises because of its capacity of overcoming resistance, it did well when considering the constraints specific to Grand Coalition governance.
... Von Münch, and several other authors, argue that it is an appropriate form of government in complex societies (Von Münch, 1999;Schniewind, Freitag & Vatter, 2009). The cooperation between political opponents to deal with the major challenges at the time is an important motivation for forming a grand coalition in Germany and Austria (Miller & Müller, 2010). The fact that the coalition partners in a grand coalition have significant parliamentary support is a key factor in the successful implementation of the policy agenda of such a coalition. ...
... Developing mutual trust between the coalition parties and intraparty trust provides an essential basis for cooperation in a coalition (Hornung, Rüsenberg, Eckert & Bandelow, 2020). In the literature on coalition government in Germany, it is evident that the policy framework for a coalition government at the federal level forms a major part of mostly rather lengthy coalition agreements (Miller & Müller, 2010). A comparative study on coalition governments in Germany, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands found that the average length of a coalition agreement is more than 30 000 words . ...
... Inter-party conflict can occur and must be managed to strengthen the coalition government's continuation. The German experience showed that conflict resolution mechanisms should be established in the coalition agreement, including ex ante and ex post conflict management mechanisms (Miller & Müller, 2010). Ex post mechanisms often used in Germany are parliamentary portfolio committees where the chairperson is from a different party than the minister for that portfolio and the appointment of junior ministers from another coalition party than that of the minister. ...
... Von Münch, and several other authors, argue that it is an appropriate form of government in complex societies (Von Münch, 1999;Schniewind, Freitag & Vatter, 2009). The cooperation between political opponents to deal with the major challenges at the time is an important motivation for forming a grand coalition in Germany and Austria (Miller & Müller, 2010). The fact that the coalition partners in a grand coalition have significant parliamentary support is a key factor in the successful implementation of the policy agenda of such a coalition. ...
... Developing mutual trust between the coalition parties and intraparty trust provides an essential basis for cooperation in a coalition (Hornung, Rüsenberg, Eckert & Bandelow, 2020). In the literature on coalition government in Germany, it is evident that the policy framework for a coalition government at the federal level forms a major part of mostly rather lengthy coalition agreements (Miller & Müller, 2010). A comparative study on coalition governments in Germany, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands found that the average length of a coalition agreement is more than 30 000 words . ...
... Inter-party conflict can occur and must be managed to strengthen the coalition government's continuation. The German experience showed that conflict resolution mechanisms should be established in the coalition agreement, including ex ante and ex post conflict management mechanisms (Miller & Müller, 2010). Ex post mechanisms often used in Germany are parliamentary portfolio committees where the chairperson is from a different party than the minister for that portfolio and the appointment of junior ministers from another coalition party than that of the minister. ...
The concept of “coalition government” or “coalition governance” is relatively new continentally, specifically in South Africa. Cases of coalition governments emerging post-1994 are extremely limited. However, in the case of local government, coalition governance only manifested itself sturdily and transitioned to the top of the municipal agenda following the 2016 and 2021 local government elections.
... Certain government coalitions represent rather consensual majorities in which parties compromise on and coordinate their policy making with little intracoalition dispute and public debate (Miller & Müller, 2010). In contrast, when parties forming coalition governments find it difficult to compromise, policy making in the cabinet is typically accompanied by discussions on policy views of each individual government party, both in the parliament and in the media. ...
... The (untested) assumption is that the ideological diversity reasonably anticipates the conflict coalition parties are likely to experience once in office. Yet such a measure does not provide information on actual conflict over issues on the government agenda, and it is rather insufficient to study the electoral ramifications of intra-coalition conflict we aim to test (for a similar argument see Miller and Müller (2010)). Indeed, to test our hypotheses, we need a measure of actual conflict among the parties in the government coalition during the legislative period, and we need this conflict to be publicly visible to have an impact on voters. ...
Combining individual-level with event-level data across 25 European countries and three sets of European Election Studies, this study examines the effect of conflict between parties in coalition government on electoral accountability and responsibility attribution. We find that conflict increases punishment for poor economic performance precisely because it helps clarify to voters parties’ actions and responsibilities while in office. The results indicate that under conditions of conflict, the punishment is equal for all coalition partners when they share responsibility for poor economic performance. When there is no conflict within a government, the effect of poor economic evaluations on vote choice is rather low, with slightly more punishment targeted to the prime minister’s party. These findings have important implications for our understanding of electoral accountability and political representation in coalition governments.
... For the sake of cross-country comparison, Germany is chosen as a benchmark case. Indeed, Germany is a textbook example of country ruled by grand coalitions (große Koalitionen) formed by opposite parties; moreover, Germany has a long tradition of detailed coalition agreements (Miller and Müller 2010;Saalfeld et al. 2019). ...
... Second, Germany has a relatively good scoring of translation of pledges into actual policies; it suffices to say that the heterogeneous grand coalition of the Merkel III government fulfilled 80% of the promises (Wehrkamp and Matthieß 2018; Thomson et al. 2017, 535). Third, Germany has an established tradition in the formation of grand coalitions between the two main party competitors (Miller and Müller 2010). 20. ...
In West European context, the first fully-fledged populist government that entered office in Italy in 2018 (Conte I) has been presented as a peculiar case. After discussing party dilemmas within coalitions, the article analyses – in comparative perspective – how the two partners M5S and League managed inter-party relations despite their divergent policy preferences. The work focuses on both structural and dynamic mechanisms of coalition governance. Particular attention is paid to the coalition agreement, which is compared to the benchmark case of the German Merkel IV cabinet. Findings show that the Conte I cabinet diverged from the Italian tradition, but approached other European models, despite its rhetoric of exceptionality. Yet, poor definition of policy goals and ambiguous governance mechanisms are observed.
... Indeed, scholarly attempts to empirically map everyday political tensions and assess conflict levels throughout time and space are remarkably scarce. Often, conflict levels are measured as the ideological distance between parties, an imperfect proxy yielding distorted results (for more reflection, see Miller & Müller, 2010). Direct measures of conflict levels are particularly rare. ...
The internal diversity of multinational states is often argued to be a burden. As ethnoterritorial tensions commonly result in political conflicts and gridlocks, such states are presumed to be harder to govern than states with more homogeneous populations. Furthermore, the conflict-proneness of multinational is thought to depend upon certain institutional features, including the decentralization level and the centripetal or centrifugal nature of the system. Investigating such claims, this paper addresses two questions: (1) Are multinational states indeed more conflict-prone than other states – as is often assumed? (2) Are certain systems indeed more conflict-prone than others? Providing a unique sight on everyday political clashes (N= 241) in Belgium and Ireland (1991-2020), this study presents a first glimpse of the ‘Comparative cabinet conflict dataset’ (CCCD; under construction), a novel and large-N dataset that will cover three decades of conflicts in more than one hundred cabinets in ten countries with varying institutional systems and levels of internal heterogeneity: Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and Ireland (1990-2020). Using this data allows us to compare countries and the potential impact of five of their features on conflict levels: states’ degree of heterogeneity (multinationalism), federal/unitary nature, level of decentralization, number of substates (bipolar/multipolar), and their centrifugal/centripetal nature. Doing so adds to ongoing debates on the so-called paradox of federalism, conflict-management in multinational states, and the literature on coalition politics more generally.
... Such bodies are extraconstitutional but they are powerful in resolving conflicts, preferably before they cause damage to the coalition. They thus constitute a place where cases of ministerial drift from the coalition policy agreement can be tabled and resolved via the mechanism of intra-party hierarchy (Andeweg & Timmermans, 2008;Miller & Müller, 2010). ...
... A few publications investigate the actual working of the mechanisms of coalition governance. Examples are studies on the implementation of conflict containment through coalition agreements (see Moury 2013;Moury and Timmermans 2013;Timmermans 2006) and coalition bodies (Miller 2010;Miller and Müller 2010). Yet the scope of these studies is severely limited in terms of the countries and governments covered. ...
... However, how MPs achieve these goals varies considerably depending on their institutional roles as members of the government or the opposition. Members of the opposition engage in oversight activities in plain sight through formal rights granted by the constitution and laws, while governing party members usually exercise this control through non-transparent and informal mechanisms that take place behind closed doors (for coalition meetings, see for instance Miller and Müller, 2010). However, recent research has shown that in coalition governments, even members of the governing parties might rely on formal procedures to control their partners (Martin and Whitaker, 2019;Höhmann and Sieberer, 2020;Höhmann and Krauss, 2021). ...
This article is the first to show that gender shapes the degree to which legislators use formal mechanisms to oversee government activities. Extensive scholarly work has analysed the use of oversight instruments, especially regarding who monitors whom. Whether, how, and why the conformity of men and women with institutional roles differs, has not yet received scholarly attention. We hypothesise that women become more active than men in overseeing the executive when in opposition while reducing their monitoring activities even more strongly than men when in government because of different social roles ascribed to men and women as well as differences in risk aversity between sexes. We analyse panel data for three oversight tools from the German Bundestag between 1949 and 2013 to test this proposition. Our findings imply that characteristics of political actors influence even a strongly institutionalised process as oversight and further clarify the gender bias in political representation.
... DeWinter 1993;Müller 1997;von Beyme 1983). In those committees, coalition parties sort out contentious issues and settle inter-ministerial disputes (for a German example, see Miller and Müller 2010). Thus, from the perspective of ordinary ministers, such committees fulfil a hierarchical function similar to those of prime ministers or ministers of finance. ...
How does ministries’ capacity to draft legislation affect the political output of modern governments? This article combines a novel dataset describing the capacity of ministerial bureaucracies to attend to about 250 distinct policy issues with content-coded data on government legislation. The sample consists of Danish, Dutch and German governments, jointly spanning the time from 1995 to 2013. The analysis reveals three main findings: firstly, issue-specific bureaucratic capacity unconditionally increases governments’ legislative activity; secondly, legislative activity is stifled if bureaucratic capacity is spread across different ministries; thirdly, against theoretical expectations the productive effect of bureaucratic capacity is not positively related to governments’ issue salience. The results indicate that the design and resources of ministerial portfolios affect policy making in western governments.
... Med søkelys på koalisjonsavtaler og partikryssere, tegner vi ikke et fullstendig bilde av koalisjonskontroll (Bergman m. fl. 2021, s. 700-709 (Miller & Müller, 2010). ...
Artikkelen studerer instrumenter for koalisjonskontroll i Norge, saerlig regjeringsavtaler og partikryssende statssekretaerer. Den spør hvordan bruken av disse instrumentene har utviklet seg mellom 1963 og 2020, og bruker blant annet regjeringsavtaler, forhandlingsprotokoller fra regjeringsforhandlinger, politiske biografier og intervjuer med tidligere regjeringspolitikere som datagrunnlag. Artikkelen finner at utviklingen i hovedsak er uavhengig av type regjering: Regjeringsavtalene blir lengre og lengre, og partikryssende statssekretaerer utplasseres i stadig flere departementer. Regjeringsavtaler er svaert viktige styrende dokumenter for koalisjonsregjeringene, som i andre europeiske land. Enkelte regjeringer, som Willoch II, har satt presedens for senere regjeringer. Videre har store og små partier i en regjering noe forskjellige preferanser: De store vil ha overordnede og generelle regjeringsavtaler, mens de mindre partiene vet at regjeringsavtalen er deres beste sjanse til å få gjennomslag for sine hjertesaker, og ønsker derfor detaljerte avtaler med tydelige løfter.
... The first two logicsrenovation and clientelismdominated the first two decades of the Second Republic. Post-war Austrian governments faced unusually stiff policy challenges, particularly in extricating Austria from the limited sovereignty of the occupation but also in overcoming a civil war in the not so distant past and sketching the basic rules of the mixed economy (Miller and Müller 2010;Pelinka 1998). By no means can we claim such challenges obliged Austria to choose a GC, but they certainly seem consistent with the 'renovation' logic. ...
Are 'grand coalitions' - coalitions that include the two largest parties in a parliamentary system - good or bad for democracy? This article analyses that question in light of the recent rise of populist parties that large mainstream parties may try to exclude from government by forming grand coalitions with other large mainstream parties. I call this the 'sterilization' logic and note that mainstream parties' ability to do this varies widely. Where parties have previously used grand coalitions primarily according to a 'clientelistic' logic - for example, Austria - mainstream parties may well be unable to rally the party system against insurgent populist challengers. Where mainstream parties have used grand coalitions exceptionally and for major institutional 'renovations' - for example, Germany - the grand coalition remains a viable option for responding to insurgent challenges, though this strategy is also quite risky. This article considers the implications for democracy by tracing recent developments in the context of the euro crisis and the European refugee situation. The major empirical referents are Austria and Germany - two countries with extensive experience and literature about grand coalitions - but the article draws out the implications of the analysis for other European parliamentary contexts.
... For example, dealing with similar data but referring to German politics,Miller and Müller (2010) adopt a similar approach. ...
Silvio Berlusconi has unquestionably been one of Italy’s most important political figures since the early 1990s. The general election campaign of February 2013 demonstrated that he is anything but out of the political game. Consequently, it seems worthwhile to examine Berlusconi as a prime minister and coalition leader. This article seeks to understand the extent to which he was able to command and guide his governing coalition, as Prime Minister, as well as his influence and the constraints on his actions. After presenting the theoretical framework, the article examines Berlusconi within the context of Italian political history and explores his impact on coalition governance by illustrating two cases of how he managed intra-coalition conflicts during his second term of office. Finally, it discusses the findings and highlights the resources Berlusconi was able to deploy ‘against’ his allies and the constraints he faced as Prime Minister. A brief comparison of Berlusconi and other Italian prime ministers is provided.
In multiparty governments, policymaking is a collaborative effort among the different incumbent parties. Often hidden by public debates about broader government policy, the necessary coordination routinely happens at the ministerial level, where ministries of different parties jointly devise viable and equitable policy solutions. However, since coordination involves substantial transaction costs, governments must carefully gauge the potential benefits. We study the political rationales that motivate governments to make this investment. We argue that coordination during the process of ministerial policy design hinges on both a conducive ministerial structure and sufficient authority. Once these conditions are met, cross‐party coordination is more likely in policy areas where the implementation of government policy cannot be taken for granted. We investigate these claims, drawing on two new datasets. The first contains information about ministerial collaborations on all legislative projects sponsored by German governments, while the second maps the distribution of policy responsibilities among German ministries from 1976 until 2013, based on data about the policy briefs of all individual working units within the top‐level federal executive. Given that ministries imprint their own perspective on legislation, our results are beyond administrative pedantries, but have substantial implications for the type and content of policies coalition governments formulate.
Government formation in multiparty systems requires election winners to strike deals to form a coalition government. Do voters respond and how do they respond to coalition government deals? This paper examines the short-term consequences of coalition government formation on voters in European democracies relying on survey panel data and original content analysis of coalition agreements. It tests theoretical expectations that deal with both the actual and perceived ideological shifts parties make when joining coalition deals as well as the effect of a much simpler heuristic cue based on preferences. The findings indicate that coalition deals have consequences on party preferences, but voter perceptions play a much stronger effect than the actual content of coalition deals. These results have important implications for our understanding of public opinion and provide important insights into the current difficulties and challenges of government formation and representative democracy.
Die jüngste Finanzmarkt- und Wirtschaftkrise hat Diskussionen über einen Bedeutungsverlust nationaler Parlamente wiederbelebt. In diesem Band wird parlamentarische Macht grundlegend theroretisch überdacht und rekonzeptualisiert. Anschließend wird Parlamentsmacht am Beispiel der Einführung von Kunjunkturprogrammen in Deutschland, Großbritannien und Schweden empirisch mithilfe qualitativer Prozessanalysen überprüft. Der Band vergleicht parlamentarische Macht im Ausnahmezustand mithilfe von Vetopunkten und ist damit nicht nur für Parlamentsforscher und Studierende der Politikwissenschaft von Interesse, sondern eröffnet zudem Parlamentariern und anderen Praktikern einen analytischen Zugang zur Funktionsweise politischer Systeme in Westeuropa.
In recent decades, Western democracies have witnessed substantial changes in the role played by political leaders. In particular, prime ministers have benefited from increasing decision-making autonomy in both the cabinet and the party, to the detriment of party organizations. In this context, Germany represents a deviant case, when compared to other West European democracies: if, on the one hand, the personalization of politics has provided the chancellor with further visibility in the media, on the other hand strong political parties and a complex system of institutional veto points have remained significant sources of limitation to monocratic government. Nevertheless, the policy autonomy of the head of government has increased in many fields: how has this been possible? This chapter investigates how German chancellors have used domestic and international crises as windows of opportunity to find new room for maneuver and promoting crucial policy turns, often in opposition to their parties. The analysis focuses on two chancellors: Gerard Schröder and Angela Merkel, whose governments are contextualized within the executive history of the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949. Particular attention is paid to Merkel’s management of the Covid-19 crisis and the institutional constraints on her action. Findings show that a relative informal strengthening process of the figure of the chancellor has not been paired by relevant changes in chancellor’s normative powers. From a comparative perspective, this result is interpreted as a signal of continuity in the ability of German political institutions to work as counterweights vis-à-vis more personal forms of leadership.
Revisiting the longstanding debate on interest representation in federal second chambers, this article investigates the influence of partisanship vis-à-vis territorial and other interests such as institutional concerns on deliberations. We argue that committees as the actual place of policy- and decision-making provide an instructive approach to understand interest representation in second chambers, just as in first chambers. For the empirical part of our study, we focus on the German Bundesrat and its committees. Based on the protocols of their meetings, we developed a new dataset that contains information on more than 51,000 roll call votes, the largest-ever empirical basis to study interest representation and decision-making in the Bundesrat. Above all, we find that partisanship plays a role, yet a minor one. The representatives prioritize individual or joint sub-state interests over their political party affiliations, just like the founding fathers of the Federal Republic have envisaged it in the German constitution.
This chapter deals with the internal decision-making process of political executives in parliamentary systems, that is, how executives take their own collective decisions. The focus is on the cabinet system as a whole, including both cabinet members and other involved party-political and bureaucratic actors. In particular, the chapter reviews literature’s debates about the nature of cabinet government, the role of prime ministers, and variations of decision-making. A special attention is payed to factors explaining intra-cabinet power distribution and the choice of different decision-making arenas. After introducing the topic, an overview of conceptual issues and main research questions is provided. Subsequently, the work discusses the way in which scholars have addressed these issues and the findings they have reached. The final part stresses existing deficits and seeks to set the agenda for future research.
En este texto se analiza la trayectoria de la relación China-Alemania durante el periodo 2005-2018 y el contenido de la agenda bilateral que ambos países han impulsado. En la investigación se identifican dos prioridades compartidas: 1) la preferencia por el incremento de sus relaciones económicas y comerciales mediante el pragmatismo económico (aunque en detrimento de un diálogo sobre los valores de la buena gobernanza) y 2) el proceso de institucionalización de la agenda de cooperación bilateral por medio de la asociación estratégica integral China-Alemania. Se considera que el incremento en las relaciones de interdependencia económica es un incentivo fundamental para la ampliación de la agenda de cooperación en su asociación estratégica. De igual modo, la asociación estratégica es un espacio institucional para el acomodo de sus intereses y la diversidad de sus preferencias (por ej., el compromiso de Alemania con las relaciones transatlánticas o los principios estructurales de la política exterior de China, como el respeto a su soberanía).
In this paper we attempt to provide the first systematic cross-national examination of Grand Coalitions in post-WWII Europe. In a first step we distinguish conceptually Grand Coalitions from all other types of governments. Then we identify the number of Grand Coalitions formed in all European countries that are democratic and have been so continuously for the last ten years. This allows us to determine whether Grand Coalitions have truly been exceptional or whether they have been more frequent than has generally been assumed. Moreover, we ascertain whether there have been any temporal trends in the formation of Grand Coalitions. For example, have they become more frequent in recent years? We shall also note some cases of countries where the party system and specific election results allowed for the formation of a grand coalition, but where this was not established. Our paper thus aims to add to the existing research in the area of coalition formation by increasing our knowledge about this peculiar type of coalition government.
Inter‐party conflict management is a typical coalitional problem in parliamentary governments. To study how and why conflicts in coalitions emerge and how parties cope with them can enhance our knowledge of coalition governance. Here, I propose a framework for comparative studies on the topic. The framework is based on the conception of coalition politics as politics of exchange. It looks at inter‐party interactions, but also accounts for the impact of intra‐party politics. Moreover, I provide a classification of inter‐party conflicts in coalitions and point out when they are more likely. The process of conflict management is operationalized with two proxies—actors, and arenas—and a taxonomy of conflict terminations is presented. The viability of the framework is tested both by mapping coalition governments according to their modes of managing internal conflicts and, after deriving research hypotheses, through empirical inquiries of conflict management in diverse coalitions.
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Party competition is a constitutive component of modern democracies. While indispensable, the division of parliament into competing political parties at the same time creates challenges for these parties. Specifically, the challenges are providing stable government, arriving at government decisions, and making these decisions part and parcel of a coherent and effective government policy. The literature has identified a myriad of mechanisms that government parties devise to master these challenges. For instance, single-party majority governments can use powerful explicit remedies of internal coordination such as electoral manifestos and strong leaders who unite the number one positions of the party (party leader) and government (Prime Minister). Single-party minority governments, in turn, may either exploit their pivotal position in the legislature or resort to parliamentary support arrangements. Finally, coalition governments often rely on political institutions as coordination mechanisms or conceive tailor-made means and mechanisms of coalition governance. The literature has identified these mechanisms, outlined how they function, and tried to define the conditions that make the resorting to these mechanisms more likely. Measures of the actual effects of such mechanisms and their optimal configuration constitute the research front. © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013. All rights are reserved.
Coalitions of political parties are a very common feature of parliamentary systems, as well as a research subject for many studies in political science. In particular, the literature has singled out four main focuses: coalition formation; portfolio allocation; coalition stability and termination; and coalition governance. They may be also conceived as phases of coalitions’ life, respectively, the birth (formation and portfolio allocation), the “existence” in the strict sense of the word and the end. Thinking of them in these terms gives a new perspective for the study of coalition politics. It becomes a continuing process of inter-party interactions inside the context of a (life) cycle in which what an actor does in a certain moment depends both on what has occurred in the past and on the expectations about the future. This paper, by adopting this theoretical framework, gives a broad reasoned and critical review of many theoretical and empirical works concerning the phases of coalition politics. First, the developments of the subfield interested in the factors affecting the composition of the coalitions are taken into account. Subsequently, I focus on the process of portfolio allocation among parties and, thirdly, on the reasons of government terminations and the related topic of government stability. The last part is dedicated to several aspects of the so called coalition governance, placed between the first two processes and the last moment. Some promising research outlooks are finally pointed out
Which kind of decisions are passed by Cabinet in coalition governments? What motivates ministerial action? How much leeway do coalition parties give their governmental representatives? This book focuses on a comparative study of ministerial behaviour in Germany, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands. It discredits the assumption that ministers are 'policy dictators' in their spheres of competence, and demonstrates that ministers are consistently and extensively constrained when deciding on policies. The first book in a new series at the forefront of research on social and political elites, this is an invaluable insight into the capacity and power of coalition government across Europe. Looking at policy formation through coalition agreements and the effectiveness of such agreements, Coalition Government and Party Mandate will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, governance and European politics.
In parliamentary systems, parties compete for votes and offices in the electoral arena, but in many, systems they also cooperate in the legislative arena. This article examines the question of how the government status of parties affects their legislative behaviour. We develop a simple spatial model that includes parties' positional goals (vote, office, etc.) to formalize the notion of accommodating legislative behaviour. The model implies that government parties are most accommodating while opposition parties are least accommodating. The hypothesis is evaluated by comparing two pairs of similar political systems: Danish and Finnish coalition governments, as well as German and Australian bicameralism. The case studies support the main hypothesis that government status systematically affects parties' level of accommodation. We discuss the implications for two seminal approaches in comparative institutional analysis advanced by Lijphart (1999b) and Tsebelis (2002).
In parliamentary systems, parties compete for votes and offices in the electoral arena, but in many systems they also cooperate in the legislative arena. This article examines the question of how the government status of parties affects their legislative behaviour. We develop a simple spatial model that includes parties positional goals (vote, office, etc.) to formalize the notion of accommodating legislative behaviour. The model implies that government parties are most accommodating while opposition parties are least accommodating. The hypothesis is evaluated by comparing two pairs of similar political systems: Danish and Finnish coalition governments, as well as German and Australian bicameralism. The case studies support the main hypothesis that government status systematically affects parties level of accommodation. We discuss the implications for two seminal approaches in comparative institutional analysis advanced by Lijphart (1999b) and Tsebelis (2002).
Cabinets and Coalition Bargaining: The Democratic Life Cycle in Western Europe provides a comprehensive analysis of coalition politics in Western Europe over the post-1945 period. It champions a dynamic approach using bargaining and transaction cost theory to understand the ‘life cycle ‘ of parliamentary politics. After a review of the literature the theory chapter addresses the roles of bargaining and transaction costs in coalition governance. Eight comparative chapters address the topics of government formation, cabinet membership, coalition agreements, portfolio allocation, conflict management, cabinet termination and duration, and the electoral consequences of coalition politics. The book is based on the most comprehensive data set ever employed in coalition studies, which includes both coalitional and single-party countries and governments. Each chapter provides a comparative overview of its topic and state-of-the art statistical analysis. Conceptually and empirically the study argues for an integrated approach to coalition politics, stressing six clusters of explanatory factors: country-specific and temporal circumstances, ‘structural attributes ‘, actors ‘ preferences, institutions, the bargaining environment, and ‘critical events ‘. While the importance of different causal factors varies between the various phases of the parliamentary life cycle, no facet of coalition politics can be understood without reference to several of these factors. Comparative Politics is a series for students and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary issues in comparative government and politics. The General Editors are David M. Farrell, Jean Monnet Chair in European Politics and Head of School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester and Alfio Mastropaolo, University of Turin. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research.
Cabinets and Coalition Bargaining: The Democratic Life Cycle in Western Europe provides a comprehensive analysis of coalition politics in Western Europe over the post-1945 period. It champions a dynamic approach using bargaining and transaction cost theory to understand the ‘life cycle ‘ of parliamentary politics. After a review of the literature the theory chapter addresses the roles of bargaining and transaction costs in coalition governance. Eight comparative chapters address the topics of government formation, cabinet membership, coalition agreements, portfolio allocation, conflict management, cabinet termination and duration, and the electoral consequences of coalition politics. The book is based on the most comprehensive data set ever employed in coalition studies, which includes both coalitional and single-party countries and governments. Each chapter provides a comparative overview of its topic and state-of-the art statistical analysis. Conceptually and empirically the study argues for an integrated approach to coalition politics, stressing six clusters of explanatory factors: country-specific and temporal circumstances, ‘structural attributes ‘, actors ‘ preferences, institutions, the bargaining environment, and ‘critical events ‘. While the importance of different causal factors varies between the various phases of the parliamentary life cycle, no facet of coalition politics can be understood without reference to several of these factors. Comparative Politics is a series for students and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary issues in comparative government and politics. The General Editors are David M. Farrell, Jean Monnet Chair in European Politics and Head of School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester and Alfio Mastropaolo, University of Turin. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research.
Cabinets and Coalition Bargaining: The Democratic Life Cycle in Western Europe provides a comprehensive analysis of coalition politics in Western Europe over the post-1945 period. It champions a dynamic approach using bargaining and transaction cost theory to understand the ‘life cycle ‘ of parliamentary politics. After a review of the literature the theory chapter addresses the roles of bargaining and transaction costs in coalition governance. Eight comparative chapters address the topics of government formation, cabinet membership, coalition agreements, portfolio allocation, conflict management, cabinet termination and duration, and the electoral consequences of coalition politics. The book is based on the most comprehensive data set ever employed in coalition studies, which includes both coalitional and single-party countries and governments. Each chapter provides a comparative overview of its topic and state-of-the art statistical analysis. Conceptually and empirically the study argues for an integrated approach to coalition politics, stressing six clusters of explanatory factors: country-specific and temporal circumstances, ‘structural attributes ‘, actors ‘ preferences, institutions, the bargaining environment, and ‘critical events ‘. While the importance of different causal factors varies between the various phases of the parliamentary life cycle, no facet of coalition politics can be understood without reference to several of these factors. Comparative Politics is a series for students and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary issues in comparative government and politics. The General Editors are David M. Farrell, Jean Monnet Chair in European Politics and Head of School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester and Alfio Mastropaolo, University of Turin. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research.
Political scientists know remarkably little about the extent to which legislatures are able to influence policymaking in parliamentary democracies. In this article, we focus on the influence of legislative institutions in periods of coalition government. We show that multiparty governments are plagued by "agency" problems created by delegation to cabinet ministers that increase in severity on issues that divide the coalition. We also argue that the process of legislative review presents an important-but understudied-institutional opportunity for coalition partners to overcome these tensions. We evaluate our argument using original legislative data on over 300 government bills collected from two parliamentary democracies. The central implication of our findings is that legislatures play a more important role in parliamentary democracies than is usually appreciated by providing a key institutional mechanism that allows coalition partners with divergent preferences to govern successfully.
Presents a formal theoretical framework that clarifies when principals can, and cannot, use delegation to accomplish desired ends. It shows the conditions (having to do with preferences and information) under which agents will act in their principals' interests and how political institutions can alleviate the perils of delegation. Finally, it discusses the implications of its theoretical insights on chains of political delegation.
Political scientists have long classified systems of government as parliamentary or presidential, two-party or multiparty, and so on. But such distinctions often fail to provide useful insights. For example, how are we to compare the United States, a presidential bicameral regime with two weak parties, to Denmark, a parliamentary unicameral regime with many strong parties? Veto Players advances an important, new understanding of how governments are structured. The real distinctions between political systems, contends George Tsebelis, are to be found in the extent to which they afford political actors veto power over policy choices. Drawing richly on game theory, he develops a scheme by which governments can thus be classified. He shows why an increase in the number of "veto players," or an increase in their ideological distance from each other, increases policy stability, impeding significant departures from the status quo. Policy stability affects a series of other key characteristics of polities, argues the author. For example, it leads to high judicial and bureaucratic independence, as well as high government instability (in parliamentary systems). The propositions derived from the theoretical framework Tsebelis develops in the first part of the book are tested in the second part with various data sets from advanced industrialized countries, as well as analysis of legislation in the European Union. Representing the first consistent and consequential theory of comparative politics, Veto Players will be welcomed by students and scholars as a defining text of the discipline.
Kaum ein Jahr nach Beginn der Amtszeit der zweiten Großen Koalition in Deutschland hatte also in den Augen der Beteiligten
das Konfliktmanagement versagt. Dennoch erreichte es sein vielleicht wichtigstes Ziel: Die Regierung unter Angela Merkel überstand
die gesamte Legislaturperiode, obwohl die Koalition viele schmerzhafte Entscheidungen treffen musste.
The coexistence of strong parties and strong committees in the U.S. Congress has been interpreted in a principal-agent framework with committees regarded as agents of the congressional parties. In a parliamentary system having coalition governments, the coexistence of strong parties and strong committees has a comparable rationale. With data during a 40-year period, the authors showthat the coalition parties in the German parliament distribute committee chair positions so that coalition parties can monitor each other’s cabinet ministers. Such monitoring is an alternative at the legislative level to intracoalition monitoring through the use of junior ministers at the executive level and is a means of enforcing coalition treaties.
In systems of proportional parliamentarism political parties play a double role. On the one hand they make delegation and accountability work; on the other they add complexity to the delegation regime, as minority situations require inter-party cooperation. Because coalition government usually involves policy compromises, the question arises how the coalition parties can ensure that the ministers stick to the coalition deal. Employing the principal–agent framework, this paper shows that coalitions can use several control mechanisms to pursue this goal. The authors consider ex ante mechanisms such as policy agreements that set the agenda for future policy decisions and coalition screening of ministerial candidates. Next they discuss the effects of ex post mechanisms such as strong committee systems and institutional checks like ‘watchdog’ junior ministers. Employing a simple spatial model, they illustrate how these instruments work. Using control mechanisms is not costless, however, and actors may want to avoid these costs. The article specifies conditions that make the use of control mechanisms likely to occur.
A fundamental divide has emerged over how portfolio payoffs are distributed among parties in parliamentary coalitions. On one side lies very strong empirical evidence that the parties in a governing coalition tend to receive portfolios in one-to-one proportion to the amount of legislative support they contribute to the coalition, with perhaps some slight deviations from proportionality coming at the expense of larger parties that lead coalition negotiations. On the other side of the debate lies a stream of formal theories that suggest the opposite – that parties in charge of coalition negotiations ought to be able to take a disproportionately large share of portfolio benefits for themselves. In this article, we address this disjuncture by re-examining the empirical connection between legislative seats and portfolio payoffs with the aid of a new and more extensive dataset, a different method of analysis, and what we see as a more valid operationalization of the dependent variable. This operationalization involves the inclusion, for the first time, of evidence concerning the importance or salience of the portfolios each party receives, as opposed to just their quantity. The article concludes with an assessment of the implications of our findings for the debate over the rewards of coalition membership in parliamentary democracies.
Parties in coalition governments must delegate to each other. Can coalition partners hold each other's ministers accountable, or must collective government degenerate to ministerial government? In this paper, I theorize about the conditions under which coalition partners should make efforts to keep tabs on each other's ministers, and the ways in which they might do so. I show that parties in Italian, Dutch, and multiparty Japanese coalitions used their allotments of junior ministerial positions to shadow each other's ministers, while parties in German coalitions relied instead on institutional devices to tie ministers' hands. I also find that during the LDP's long reign as a majority party in Japan, its factions kept tabs on each other's ministers in this same way. Finally, I demonstrate that parties were more likely to keep tabs on each other's ministers for the most important ministerial portfolios.
Parliamentary democracy means that the political executive is accountable to the parliamentary majority. However, when both the parliamentary majority and the cabinet consist of two or more distinct political parties, it is often difficult for the parliamentary majority to monitor and control the executive. In this article, we focus on political delegation from parliamentarians to the executive branch under multiparty parliamentary government. We identify the most important mechanisms parliamentary parties employ to remedy the accountability problems that may arise, as well as the arenas in which they are exercised: the executive arena, the parliamentary arena, and the extraparliamentary arena. We discuss the effectiveness of accountability mechanisms arena by arena, examine their use in 15 Western European countries that frequently feature coalition governments, and review our knowledge of how parliaments and parliamentary parties control political delegation and accountability in coalition governments.
Coalition formation is a pervasive aspect of social life. This paper presents a theory of coalition formation with a statement of conditions and assumptions. While applicable to groups of varying sizes, it is shown to be consistent with Caplow's theory of coalitions in the triad. It successfully handles the experimental results of Vinacke and Arkoff. Finally, the applicability of various work in n-person game theory is discussed with the conclusion that, in its present state, it fails to provide a basis for a descriptive theory of coalitions.
Gamson's Law—the proposition that coalition governments will distribute portfolios in proportion to each member party's contribution of seats to the coalition—has been one of the most prominent landmarks in coalitional studies since the 1970s. However, standard bargaining models of government formation argue that Gamson's Law should not hold, once one controls for relevant indicators of bargaining power. In this article, we extend these bargaining models by allowing parties to form pre-election pacts. We argue that campaign investments by pact signatories depend on how they anticipate portfolios will be distributed and, thus, signatories have an incentive to precommit to portfolio allocation rules. We show that pacts will sometimes agree to allocate portfolios partly or wholly in proportion to members' contributions of seats to the coalition; this increases each signatory's investment in the campaign, thereby conferring external benefits (in the form of a larger probability of an alliance majority) on other coalition members. Empirical tests support the model's predictions.
Coalition governments typically face problems from conflicting preferences of the cabinet parties. For many reasons individual
ministers are likely to pursue party rather than coalition policies. Yet, the doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility
ties the coalition as a whole to government policy. In this chapter, we study how coalitions as collective actors can strengthen
the link to their ministers. Drawing on the principal–agent approach and the literature on coalition governance, we identify
several mechanisms that help to establish coalition control over individual ministers. We discuss how specific control mechanisms
serve the functions of contract design, screening, monitoring, and institutional checks familiar from the delegation literature.
Employing data from post-war Western European coalitions and using multi-level models, we present a unified analysis of coalition
governance. Focussing on the architecture of coalition governance, we argue that coalition cabinets employ control mechanisms
that complement each other. A country’s experience with specific control mechanisms, the coalition’s bargaining environment,
the actors’ policy preferences, and political institutions determine whether coalition parties are willing to bear the costs
of negotiating compromises.
This paper investigates the hypothesis thatcoalition behaviour in West European parliamentarysystems is conditioned by the existence of `policyhorizons' that delimit the extent to which partiescan compromise on policy positions in order toparticipate in government. The first part of thepaper demonstrates that policy horizons are impliedby certain conceptions of party utility and thattheir existence would entail important constraintson the coalition game; in particular, they wouldproduce equilibrium outcomes in some situationswhere voting cycles would normally be expected andthey would tend to confine possible outcomes tocentral locations in the policy space in the absenceof equilibria. The paper then develops a method ofestimating policy horizons empirically in order toshow that they account to a substantial extent forboth the size and party composition of governingcoalitions in these systems.
Parliamentary democracy has been widely embraced bypoliticians and especially by the scholarly communitybut remains less widely understood. In this essay, Iidentify the institutional features that defineparliamentary democracy and suggest how they can beunderstood as delegation relationships. I proposetwo definitions: one minimal and one maximal (orideal-typical). In the latter sense, parliamentarydemocracy is a particular regime of delegation andaccountability that can be understood with the help ofagency theory, which allows us to identify theconditions under which democratic agency problems mayoccur. Parliamentarism is simple, indirect, andrelies on lessons gradually acquired in the past. Compared to presidentialism, parliamentarism hascertain advantages, such as decisional efficiency andthe inducements it creates toward effort. On theother hand, parliamentarism also implies disadvantagessuch as ineffective accountability and a lack oftransparency, which may cause informationalinefficiencies. And whereas parliamentarism may beparticularly suitable for problems of adverseselection, it is a less certain cure for moral hazard.In contemporary advanced societies, parliamentarism isfacing the challenges of decaying screening devicesand diverted accountabilities
In modern democracies politicalparties exist because (1) they reduce transactioncosts in the electoral, parliamentary and governmentalarenas and (2) help overcome the dilemma of collectiveaction. In Western Europe political parties are the central mechanism to make the constitutionalchain of political delegation and accountability workin practice. Party representatives in public officeare ultimately the agents of the extra-parliamentaryparty organization. In order to contain agency lossparties rely on party-internal mechanisms and theinstitutionalisation of party rights in public rulesand, in contrast to US parties, they apply the fullrange of ex ante and ex post mechanisms.Generally, the role of party is weaker the furtherdown the chain of delegation.
Delegation from cabinet to ministers iscomplicated because the cabinet consists of the sameministers that are supposed to act as its agents. Inthe extreme case ministers are completely autonomouswithin their portfolio. This paper argues that theresulting potential for agency loss is limited, butnot negated, by both hierarchy and collectivedecision-making in cabinet, or by establishing directdelegation relationships between legislativecommittees or political parties and ministers,bypassing the government. Appointments to ministerialoffice are the prevailing exception to ministerialautonomy. To the extent that ministerial preferencesare not stable and exogenous, screening beforeappointments is an ineffective control, andministerial identification with departmental interestsis the most probable source of agency loss.
Mehrheitsbeschaffer oder Reform-Motor? A Conceptionalization of junior Party Policy Influence Applied to the German Greens
- O Leirbukt
O. Leirbukt, Mehrheitsbeschaffer oder
Reform-Motor? A Conceptionalization of junior Party Policy Influence Applied to the German Greens
1998-2002 (Master's Thesis, Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen, 2004), p.117.
Mutual Veto? How Coalitions Work
- Mü
- Meyer
Mü and Meyer, 'Mutual Veto? How Coalitions Work'.
Parliamentary Committees
- I Mattson
- K Strøm
I. Mattson and K. Strøm, 'Parliamentary Committees', in H. Döring (ed.), Parliaments and Majority
Rule in Western Europe (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1995), pp.249-307.
Parliamentary Committees and Multi-Party Government', Paper for presen-tation at the ECPR Joint Sessions
- S Martin
- S Depauw
S. Martin and S. Depauw, 'Parliamentary Committees and Multi-Party Government', Paper for presen-tation at the ECPR Joint Sessions 2009, Lisbon, 14–19 April.
Mutual Veto? How Coalitions Work Reform Processes and Policy Change: How do Veto Players Determine Decision-Making in Modern Democracies
- W C Mü
- T N Meyer
W.C. Mü and T.N. Meyer, 'Mutual Veto? How Coalitions Work', in T. Kö, G. Tsebelis and M. Debus (eds), Reform Processes and Policy Change: How do Veto Players Determine Decision-Making in Modern Democracies (Heidelberg: Springer, 2010);
Der Koalitionsausschuss: Existenz, Einsatz und Effekte einer informellen Arena des Koalitionsmanagements
- B Miller
B. Miller,
Der Koalitionsausschuss: Existenz, Einsatz und Effekte einer informellen Arena des Koalitionsmanagements (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010).
Coalition Governance in Western Europe', p.573. This conclusion can only be a tentative one With so few cases, clustered in only two countries and dispersed over long stretches of time, country-and time-specific alternative explanations cannot be ruled out
- Mü
- Strøm
Mü and Strøm, 'Coalition Governance in Western Europe', p.573. This conclusion can only be a tentative one. With so few cases, clustered in only two countries and dispersed over long stretches of time, country-and time-specific alternative explanations cannot be ruled out.
Existenz, Einsatz und Effekte einer informellen Arena des Koali-tionsmanagements in vergleichender und bundesdeutscher Perspektive There are no comparable studies for the other types of coalition management mechanisms
- B Miller
B. Miller, Der Koalitionsausschuss: Existenz, Einsatz und Effekte einer informellen Arena des Koali-tionsmanagements in vergleichender und bundesdeutscher Perspektive (PhD Thesis, Mannheim Uni-versity, 2009). There are no comparable studies for the other types of coalition management mechanisms.
Portfolio Allocation
- L Verzichelli
L. Verzichelli, 'Portfolio
Allocation', in Strøm et al. (eds), Cabinets and Coalition Bargaining, pp.237-68.
Informelles Regieren -Koalitionsmanagement der Regierung Merkel
- W Rudzio
W. Rudzio, 'Informelles Regieren -Koalitionsmanagement der Regierung Merkel', Aus Politik und
Zeitgeschichte 16 (2008), p.14.
High Politics in the Low Countries
- Timmermans
Timmermans, High Politics in the Low Countries, p.154;
Data from: http://www.foederalismus.uni-jena.de/foederalismus/index.php?option=com_content&task= view&id=14&Itemid=66 (accessed 20 Feb. 2009); cf. S. LeunigAB(C) oder ROM? Zur Operationalisier-ung von Mehrheitsverhä im Bundesrat
- P Graf
P. Graf Kielmansegg, Nach der Katastrophe: Eine Geschichte des geteilten Deutschland (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 2001), p.371. 30. Data from: http://www.foederalismus.uni-jena.de/foederalismus/index.php?option=com_content&task= view&id=14&Itemid=66 (accessed 20 Feb. 2009); cf. S. Leunig, 'AB(C) oder ROM? Zur Operationalisier-ung von Mehrheitsverhä im Bundesrat', Zeitschrift fü Parlamentsfragen 37/2 (2006), pp.402–20.
Other motives may have been relevant too, such as the need to find suitable positions for those MPs who might have been ministers provided their party had received the relevant government department. 42. Part of the reason for the high level of committee chair screening certainly is opportunity
- W Ismayr
W. Ismayr, Der Deutsche Bundestag im politischen System der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 2000), p.177. 41. Other motives may have been relevant too, such as the need to find suitable positions for those MPs who might have been ministers provided their party had received the relevant government department. 42. Part of the reason for the high level of committee chair screening certainly is opportunity. With fewer seats allocated to the opposition the governing parties had more to pick from.
Ministers as Double Agents
- Andeweg Miller
- Der
Andeweg, 'Ministers as Double Agents?'; Miller, Der Koalitionsausschuss.
Informalisierung und Parteipolitisierung: Zum Wandel exekutiver Entscheidungsprozesse in der Bundesrepublik
- P Manow
P. Manow, 'Informalisierung und Parteipolitisierung: Zum Wandel exekutiver Entscheidungsprozesse
in der Bundesrepublik', Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen 27/1 (1996), pp.96-107 discusses the issue
before developments from the Adenauer years through Kohl.
Wendejahre: Die Sozialdemokratie in der Zeit der Großen Koalition
- K Schönhoven
K. Schönhoven, Wendejahre: Die Sozialdemokratie in der Zeit der Großen Koalition 1966-1969
(Bonn: Dietz, 2004);
- P. Graf Kielmansegg
- Nach Der Katastrophe
P. Graf Kielmansegg, Nach der Katastrophe: Eine Geschichte des geteilten Deutschland (Berlin:
Siedler Verlag, 2001), p.371.