The Dynamics of Political Agendas in Coalition Governments

Coalition governments in the Netherlands draft comprehensive agreements to set a policy equilibrium between their members and to present the legislative agenda for the term in office. When incumbent, governments face an important institutional constraint: the carrying capacity of the legislative agenda is more bounded than the coalition agreement. Coalition governance mechanisms may help to keep the government on track in maintaining the policy equilibrium, but coalition partners also must respond to information signals and pressure for resetting priorities. This paper analyzes the coalition policy agenda in the Netherlands between 1981 and 2011 and examines the hypothesis that coalition governments drift away from their initial policy agenda set in government formation. For this it uses new datasets containing indicators of political attention during different time points in coalition governments, for a period of 30 years. The paper not only analyzes the pattern of attention it also considers what parties in the coalition win and what parties lose in this process.