What are They Talking About? Topic Coverage of Coalition Agreements in Multi-Level Settings

When analysing coalition agreements, scholars mostly concentrate on those agreements that are written at the national level. However, there is also a considerable amount of coalition agreements that are written at sub-national levels. This paper analyses the commonalities and differences in coalition agreements in the German multi-level system on the national, regional and local level. We expect that there are major differences in the topics covered in the agreements, both between the different levels of a political system and between different coalition patterns, which has decisive consequences for legislative politics. We take Germany as an illustrative case because it is characterised by a rather clear structure with regard to the legal competencies of the different political levels. Yet, the German multi-level system is also characterised by joint decision making, i.e. national, regional and local political actors are participating in central decisions which may have adverse effects on dual accountability and citizens’ possibilities to attribute responsibility. Furthermore, the political system of Germany is characterised by a great variety of different coalition alternatives across all levels, thus enabling us to analyse the effects of varying coalition patterns on the content of coalition agreements. Combining data from the Political Documents Archive (www.polidoc.net) with newly data from the Local Manifesto Project (LMP; www.localpartymanifestos.de), we will analyse nearly 200 coalition agreements on the national, regional and local level in Germany by applying quantitative text analysis techniques. Additionally, we will expand this data by including political, societal and economic variables that theoretically might affect the topic coverage of coalition agreements in multi-level systems.