Blame-Shifting and Ministerial Drift: When Coalition Parties Stop Delegating to Partners

Making policy in coalition is a balancing act between parties' need to cooperate with governing partners and their needs to deliver policies that please their own voters. I provide evidence that parties in coalition delegate more policy making to ministers early on in coalition governments and argue that this is meant to reduce clarity of responsibility about compromise policies. As time passes, and the expected continuing duration of the coalition decreases, delegating to ministers increases the risk of policy drift and so coalition parties stop delegating and use more legislative and cabinet-level policy instruments. In a large sample of coalition government policy making from 1986 to 2008 in several Western European democracies, I show that as time passes coalitions increasingly rely on primary legislation and cabinet decrees, shifting away from policy tools increasing ministerial discretion. A separate analysis of single-party governments shows no evidence of such changes in policy making.