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One of the biggest challenges parties in multiparty governments face is making policies together and overcoming the risk of a policy stalemate. Scholars have devoted much attention to the study of how various institutions in cabinet and parliament help coalition parties with conflicting policy preferences to be efficient in the policy-making process. Coalition agreements are one of many instruments coalition partners can use to facilitate policy making. However, many scholars describe such agreements’ actual role as cheap talk, due to their legally non-enforceable nature. Do coalition agreements make a difference in the policy-making productivity of multiparty governments? To address this question, this article focuses on governments’ policy output and investigates whether coalition agreements increase the policy-making productivity of multiparty cabinets. Its central argument is that written agreements between coalition partners strengthen the capacity of coalition governments to make policy reforms, even when there is a high degree of ideological conflict among partners. To evaluate this argument, the article analyzes data on economic reform measures adopted by national governments in 11 Western European countries over a 40-year period (1978–2017), based on a coding of more than 1000 periodical country reports issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The results show that while coalition agreements foster policy productivity in minimal winning cabinets, they play a weaker role in minority and surplus governments. Coalition agreements limit the negative effect of intra-cabinet ideological conflict on reform productivity, suggesting that such contracts help parties overcome the risk of policy stalemate.

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.

This article investigates whether governing parties strategically time austerity policies to help them win re-election. It contributes to existing research by focusing directly on government policy output, analyzing over 1,200 welfare and taxation austerity measures in thirteen Western European countries over twenty years. In line with previous research, the authors find that governments become less likely to introduce austerity measures as elections approach. The study introduces original hypotheses about which governments have the ability and opportunity to strategically time policy decisions. The authors suggest that minimal winning cabinets with leadership change (new prime ministers) face less complex bargaining environments and can credibly shift responsibility for austerity measures to the preceding government. The empirical analyses show that these governments are most likely to strategically time austerity policies.

The United Kingdom’s 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum vote to leave the European Union (EU) raised concerns that other countries would follow suit. This article examines how arguments about EU membership related to economic, cultural, political, and security and peace issues could influence how citizens would vote in EU membership referendums. Our two-wave survey experiment on a random sample of the German population and difference-in-differences analysis revealed that only fears of being outvoted in EU decision-making swayed German voters’ attitudes about EU membership, particularly voters with weaker EU support, little EU knowledge and low levels of political engagement. We therefore conclude that concerns about sovereignty loss can be drivers of Euroscepticism even in a country that has vast influence over EU decisions.

Models of coalition governance suggest that political parties pursue the interests of their electorate through the ministerial control of policy in their portfolios. Yet, little is known whether voters reward or punish coalition parties for policy performance in their portfolios. This study investigates voters’ evaluations of the policy priorities of coalition parties and their responsibility attribution in twenty policy areas using survey data from Germany. Specifically, we investigate whether voters attribute policy responsibility equally across coalition parties, along the jurisdictional lines of ministerial portfolios, or to the dominant party in the coalition. Our findings suggest that party size, prime minister status, and ministerial portfolios are decisive for responsibility attribution.

This study presents a synthesis of quantitative and qualitative research on compliance with EU directives. We identify and code 12 theoretical arguments tested in 37 published compliance studies and evaluate the robustness and representativeness of their findings. Our synthesis reveals robust findings for the ‘goodness-of-fit’ and ‘institutional decision-making’ arguments, while results on ‘actors’ policy preferences' and ‘administrative efficiency’ remain ambiguous. A closer examination of the studies' research design suggests policy and country selection effects. Specifically, most studies focus on environmental and social policies and rarely include complying Scandinavian states and non-complying Southern states. We therefore recommend a cautious interpretation of existing compliance findings and, for future compliance research, a more careful selection of countries and policy fields.

Veto player theory generates predictions about governments’ capacity for policy change. Due to the difficulty of identifying significant laws needed to change the policy status quo, evidence about governments’ ability to change policy has been mostly provided for a limited number of reforms and single‐country studies. To evaluate the predictive power of veto player theory for policy making across time, policy areas and countries, a dataset was gathered that incorporates about 5,600 important government reform measures in the areas of social, labour, economic and taxation policy undertaken in 13 Western European countries from the mid‐1980s until the mid‐2000s. Veto player theory is applied in a combined model with other central theoretical expectations on policy change derived from political economy (crisis‐driven policy change) and partisan theory (ideology‐driven policy change). Robust support is found that governments introduce more reform measures when economic conditions are poor and when the government is positioned further away from the policy status quo. No empirical support is found for predictions of veto player theory in its pure form, where no differentiation between government types is made. However, the findings provide support for the veto player theory in the special case of minimal winning cabinets, where the support of all government parties is sufficient (in contrast to minority cabinets) and necessary (in contrast to oversized cabinets) for policy change. In particular, it is found that in minimal winning cabinets the ideological distance between the extreme government parties significantly decreases the government's ability to introduce reforms. These findings improve our understanding of reform making in parliamentary democracies and highlight important issues and open questions for future applications and tests of the veto player theory.