Policy Payoff Allocation in Multiparty Cabinets

• In Event: The Life-Cycle of Multiparty Parliamentary Government

Abstract

How are policy payoffs in coalition governments allocated? Political parties forming a multiparty cabinet join forces for the purpose of entering government, but they pursue different policy objectives. Coalition parties therefore have to come to an agreement with regard to policies that should be implemented during the time of office. At the beginning of the legislative term, coalition parties therefore engage in intensive bargaining and formulate a coalition agreement that sets out the policy priorities for the upcoming term. While the literature on coalition governments has devoted considerable attention to explaining which parties are likely to form coalitions and to predicting the allocation of ministerial portfolios, the allocation of policy payoffs has largely been neglected. Since understanding how policies are distributed in coalition negotiations has crucial implications for policy-making during the legislative term, we aim at filling this important gap in the literature. We argue that the policy payoffs a coalition party receives during coalition negotiations importantly depends on the salience of policy issues to the party and on its bargaining power in the cabinet. Our theoretical expectations are tested drawing on a large new dataset on the content of coalition agreements that was generated by a comprehensive quantitative content analysis of coalition agreements. Using this novel dataset, we test the effect of issue salience and bargaining power on a coalition party’s policy payoffs studying more than 250 multiparty cabinets in 23 Western and Eastern European countries from 1977 until 2015 while controlling for other party and cabinet characteristics. Our results have important implications for our understanding of coalition formation, coalition governance and policy-making in multiparty systems.

Authors

• Hanna Back, Lund University

• Heike Klüver, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin