Coalition Government and Policy Outcomes: Germany, 1994-2017

Parliamentary government is predominantly coalition government, yet its effects on policy outcomes is little understood. Democratic theory puts responsiveness to voters’ preferences front and centre (Dahl, 1989; Powell, 2000), and so the extent to which coalition government enables or prevents this from happening is of central normative and practical concern. Due to the incentives and opportunities for coalition partners to move outcomes away from agreed positions (see e.g. Martin & Vanberg, 2014), coalition government may lead to off-median outcomes. Multidimensional log-rolling can have the same effect, while intra-coalition vetoes of policy change may lead to the status quo prevailing against a parliamentary majority. However, due to a lack of comparable data on parties’ policy positions, the location of the status quo, and policy outcomes, the extent of these problems is unknown. This paper proposes a method which allows, firstly, for the identifying of the key policy issues in any given term, and secondly, a unified coding scheme which, for any given issue, produces, on the same scale, data on the position of each parliamentary party, of the status quo, as well as the substantive policy outcome; crucially, these data are also comparable across issues. The paper then uses the data obtained through this method to study the effect of coalition government on policy outcomes at the federal level in Germany, covering six terms (1994-2017) and 120 policy issues, while also exploring the effect of junior ministers and bicameralism on policy outcomes under coalition government.