At the Beginning, at the End or Never? Testing Mutual Control of Law-Making in Coalition Governments

One of the strongest theories in legislative studies explores the dilemma of coalition governments: partners must cooperate in order to meet common goals and be viewed as united and capable body, yet the parties still compete for voters. When preparing legislation, each coalition partner and its ministers might use their informational advantage to pursue individual goals incompatible with others, who on the other hand try to counter the ministerial drift and monitor the partners or seek to change the content of the bills. Parties have developed various instruments for mutual control in coalition governments such as coalition councils or shadowing by junior ministers. To our knowledge, any empirical testing of the theory has been so far performed only at the parliamentary stage of the legislation process, primarily through analysis of activities of coalition deputies in the committees (e.g. Martin and Vanberg 2011, André et al. 2016). We suggest an approach that would focus more on the executive stage of the “game”. Research assumes that chances to shape the bill decreases with level of its development. It shall thus be more effective for “competing” ministers to intervene while the bill is still drafted within the executive rather than to wait for parliamentary negotiations. To this end, some states introduced inter-ministerial consultations where each ministry might formally enter any legal or political objections to a bill which must be then resolved by the drafting ministry. Since 2010, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have undergone various configurations of coalition governments. We aim to test the abovementioned theory on unique dataset (coded from internal governmental databases) containing results of all inter-ministerial consultations in these states between 2010 and 2016. Analysis will try to reveal 1) if the consultations are used to exercise mutual control of legislative outputs, or 2) if this instrument serves more as a bureaucratic exercise and ministers (and their parties) rather leave the fight to the later stages, or 3) if the theory does not apply at all and high autonomy of ministers typical for post-communist states precludes any efforts for containing the drift.