Government Formation, Policy-making and Cabinet Stability

• In Event: Bargaining and Policy-making in Multiparty Governments

Abstract

Do coalition negotiations influence the stability of coalition governments? Since coalition parties usually have diverging preferences, they negotiate a joint policy programme outlined in a coalition agreement before forming a cabinet. However, little is known about the long-term impact of the negotiated policy agenda. Parties might be tempted to only include policy issues in the coalition agreement that they can easily agree on while excluding conflictual issues to quickly take over offices and signal efficiency to voters. In such a case, a coalition agreement might not necessarily have a positive influence on the stability of the cabinet as unsettled divisive issues can lead to serious conflicts between coalition partners throughout the legislative term. In this paper, we accordingly argue that cabinets are more stable if parties negotiated compromises not only on uncontested, but more importantly also on conflictual policy issues. More specifically, we hypothesize that cabinets last longer, the more extensive conflictual issues are covered in the coalition agreement. We test out theoretical argument by relying on a comparative dataset on the content of coalition agreements in 24 Eastern and Western European countries from 1945 until 2015. Our results have major implications for the largely overlooked relationship between coalition governance and cabinet stability.

Authors

• Svenja Krauss, University of Essex

• Heike Klüver, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin