Parties, Partners, Principals, and Agents: Coalition Politics and Individual Preferences in Institutional Context

Parliamentary structure and process---from the number of chambers to the importance of committees, the role of legislative leadership, and cabinet coalition status---defines the levers of legislative influence. The individuals who hold those levers can shape legislation, creating the potential for agency loss from party leader to agent as well as across coalition partner parties. Political scientists view this delegation problem through the prism of delegation management. But focusing on the issue from the principal's perspective both distracts from the question of what agents get out of the deal where party-member preferences are heterogeneous and ignores the interplay between the preferences of individual party members, the incentives of party leaders, and the inevitable tension across parties that compete at the ballot box but also have to cooperate in order to legislate. Instead of looking at the principal's problem, I start with the presumption that policing delegation is costly precisely because individual agents are self-interested; this approach highlights the question of whether and how agents benefit from their offices and, more broadly, raises the observation of collective cabinet responsibility from empirical regularity to theoretical problem.