Manifesto Pledges and Coalition Agreements in Czech County Towns after the 2014 Local Elections: Focus on Austerity

The paper deals with coalition strategies of party leaders in Czech county towns in austerity time (concerns the questions formulated by panel: „What strategies city leaders devise to enhance governing capacity to solve complex issues in times of austerity?“ „How city leaders employ a democratic mandate to construct coalitions around policy problems?“). The local elections in the Czech Republic in 2014 were special because of the success of three different kinds of parties. As the winner of elections in big towns is considered the populist party ANO of businessman Andrej Babiš, currently the government party at national level. Established democratic parties and local-issue oriented candidate lists earned votes and could negotiate about coalitions in these towns, too. The paper is focused on (possibly different) strategies of these types of parties in post-election coalition negotiations with special interest to austerity topics. Parties are (in party mandate theory) expected to strive for fulfilling manifesto pledges. Adoption of pledge into coalition agreement strengthens the odds of promise to be fulfilled. The expectations are mainly tested at national level. In 2014, all (later) coalition parties in county towns formulated manifestos (short and vague, at the first sight). The questions about aim of manifestos and relation between manifesto promises and coalition agreement are relevant at local level. The expectation of different strategies/success of different party types in negotiating coalition agreement is relevant, too. The paper firstly summarizes lenghth and content of party manifestos and answers the questions about strategies of different party types in fulfilling democratic party mandate (with emphasis to austerity): In what way have coalition parties used austerity topics in electoral manifestos? Were austerity topics adopted into coalition agreements? Were different kinds of parties differently succesful in adoption of manifesto pledges? What influenced adoption of austerity pledges into agreements?