The Legislative Enactment of Election Pledges: A Comparative Analysis of a Majority and a Minority Government in the German State of Nordrhein-Westfalen

Drawing on the party mandate literature, this analysis examines the legislative enactment of election pledges in the German State of Nordrhein-Westfalen during a majority coalition (2005-2007) and one of the rare cases of a minority coalition (2010-2012). While previous research focused on the national level, this study provides the first analysis of parties’ pledge fulfilment on the regional-state level using the pledge-approach provided by the Comparative Party Pledges Group. In addition, it adds new evidence on pledge enactment in minority governments: Do majority coalitions enjoy advantage over minority coalitions in terms of legislative pledge fulfilment? Minority governments do require cooperation of legislators from other parties to pass bills. This may limit their possibility to fulfil pledges. On the other side, theoretical and empirical research indicates that minority governments can form legislative coalitions and that they perform well. Based on a favourable bargaining position (agenda power and centred position of the government) minority governments do not seem to be disadvantaged compared to majority governments. In a normative perspective, they even provide some advantages over majority governments: They are able to form flexible legislative coalitions with outcomes close to the median position. A manually coded textual analysis of election manifestos of all government parties, constrained to education pledges (since regulated by the federal states in Germany), is conducted. The coding of the fulfilment of pledges is based on enacted laws. The descriptive findings and the multivariate analysis that is based on a binary logistic regression model suggest that both governments do not fulfil most of the pledges in the available time. In addition to the majority status, the regression model takes other variables as the ministerial portfolio or consensus between parties into account. Further, in the case of the minority government a higher percentage of pledges is only partially fulfilled. This suggests that the government parties have to make concessions to opposition parties in order to find support for their legislative proposals.