Ministerial Effects on the Fulfilment of Election Pledges

We develop and test an explanation of the impact of ministers on government policy. The ministerial portfolio allocation model has been a point of reference for scholarship on policymaking in coalitions, and our explanation builds on a version of that model by incorporating the characteristics of individual ministers and the policy proposals they might enact. The portfolio allocation model posits that the best prediction of government policy in any given area is given by the policy preference of party of the minister responsible for that area. Notwithstanding the plausibility and elegance of this model, the evidence for this main proposition has been mixed, which suggests there are conditions under which it is more or less apt. Our explanation specifies these conditions by formulating propositions regarding the impact of ministers’ preferences on and capacity to realise particular election pledges that fall under their jurisdictions. An election pledge is a promise made a party during an election campaign to take a specific and verifiable policy action if it enters government. Ministers’ preferences on election pledges derive both from their affinity with the ideological position of their parties and the extent to which pledges are congruent with those ideological positions. For instance, a committed socialist minister in a left-wing party is more likely to fulfil the party’s pledges to expand government programmes and raise taxes than other pledges. In addition to ministers’ ideological position and the content of pledges, our explanation considers ministers’ capacity to bring about policy change, which is in turn influenced by their standing in the party and relevant policy-area expertise. Given that these elements relate mainly to intra-party politics, and that single-party cabinets are more likely to undergo frequent reshuffles to adapt to new circumstances, our version of the portfolio allocation model is not limited to coalition governments. To test our explanation, we bring together research from two previously unconnected research programmes: the Selection and Deselection of Political Elites Research Network (SEDEPE) and the Comparative Party Pledges Project (CPPP). The SEDEPE Network has collected a wealth of detailed information on ministers, including their positions inside their parties and careers outside party politics. The systematic coding of this evidence allows us to formulate comparable indicators of ministers’ preferences and capacities. The CPPP has identified parties’ election pledges during election campaigns and evaluated pledge fulfilment during subsequent governing periods. This has involved detailed qualitative assessments of government actions in relation to thousands of specific promises in twelve countries, including parties that went on to form single-party and coalition governments. We take the first step in linking these programmes by focusing on the fulfilment of 3912 pledges made by Irish parties in the period 1977–2016. During this long period Ireland was governed by all possible cabinet types (single-party majority, single-party minority, majority coalition, minority coalition), allowing us to control for the effect of cabinet structure and support but also to devise and test specific hypotheses regarding the effect of ministers on pledge fulfilment in those different conditions.