Under the Influence: Legislative Support Parties and Their Impact on the Law-Making Process. Insights from Romania

In times of rising support for populist parties and high legislative fragmentation, parties face severe bargaining difficulties for government formation and maintenance in most European national parliaments. Consequently, forming minority cabinets became a more frequent solution in multiparty systems. In order to ensure their survival and implement their policy program, minority governments have to make concessions to non-cabinet parties. In this paper, we analyze the benefits for such support parties under minority governments. Our theoretical arguments concentrate firstly, on the impact of the formality of support arrangements, and secondly, on the differences between party types of support parties. We argue that ethno-regional parties with official written agreements are mostly policy seeking. This outcome is conditional on their main interest to implement group-focused policies. In contrast, mainstream parties are more office- and vote-orientated and aim at side payments such as more junior positions in the administration. Our empirical analysis draws on the evaluation of explicit and implicit support arrangements under eight minority governments in Romania. The Romanian case is attractive for studying arrangements for legislative support since it offers sufficient variance on our key variables while keeping important confounding variables constant. Our results have important implications for a better understanding of support parties under minority governments and contribute to the fields of policy making, minority governments, party competition, and substantive representation of ethnic minorities.