The Effect of Ministerial Discretion on Redistribution in Parliamentary Democracies

To what extent can cabinet ministers exercise autonomy over their policy domain? More specifically, can ministers secure changes in distributive policy by securing the relevant portfolios? In this research we examine the claim that ministers have discretion over policy within their own jurisdictions, a situation permitted by informational and administrative advantages that they enjoy vis-á-vis other cabinet ministers. However, we argue that ministers have greater capacity to exercise autonomy over policy under certain conditions. In particular, we hypothesise that one of the central mechanisms that is designed to constrain coalition partners – the coalition agreement – is an incomplete contract, the conditions of which weaken as a new election approaches. We therefore expect ministers to have greater capacity to exercise autonomy later in the parliamentary term. Using a dataset of 28 parliamentary democracies we test this proposition on redistributive outcomes. We find that left-wing welfare ministers can tend to increase redistribution in a given country, irrespective of the ideological persuasion of the overall cabinet, suggesting that ministers in this domain enjoy relative autonomy over policy. Our findings also indicate that these results are magnified in the latter stages of a government’s term in office thus indicating support for our assertion that coalition agreements are incomplete contracts.