Strong in Theory but Weak in Practice. Bargaining and the Role of Legislative Committees During Minority Government

In his seminal work minority governments, Strøm (1990) associated strong legislative committees with minority governments: Committee powers to scrutinize legislation makes it more attractive to remain in opposition and rule from the backbench. Yet, empirical observations of Denmark and Norway where minority governments are common - and where committees hold strong formal powers with regard legislation and control - point out that deal-making on policies or even deliberation over government policy – does not take place within legislative committees (Papers planned by Rommetvedt and Christiansen for IPSA 2018). Furthermore, control activity appear to involve those parties, which are not part of government (ct. Martin & Vanberg, 2011); and only those opposition parties that on the topics in question are not part of policy deals. The paper’s purpose is to describe and analyze theoretically and empirically to what extent and why certain opposition parties during minority governments in Denmark and Norway refrain from actively using powers of legislative committees as a setting to form policy compromises; and refrain from control activities on certain topics. To explain these apparent contradictions, the paper draws on theories of bargaining and of agenda setting. We should expect bargaining political parties to need space for evaluation of proto-deals without being subject to public scrutiny and attacks from other parties. When minority governments form deals with opposition parties, they not only offer policy influence in return for passing of policy; they also buy silence on the political agenda (Christiansen and Seeberg, 2016). In legislative committees, all members possess formal rights hard to limit. In an informal setting the minority government and selected opposition parties may instead develop and form ‘cartels’ where only they have policy influence, and only they perform control, not the others. The paper analyzes these propositions using both quantitative and qualitative measures. It relies on interviews with MPs, and minutes from public hearings on whether legislative committees perform as intended. Furthermore, the paper studies the legislative activities of opposition parties in committees. For this purpose, the paper uses a unique data set on legislative deals in the Danish parliament collected by the author. The assessment of Norwegian policy deals will be case-based and qualitative. The expectation is for date to indicate that policy is formed in closed negotiations between minority governments and opposition parties – not the same policy deals in each area – is where policy is formed. The Danish and Norwegian cases will be used for comparison. Despite similar, they have some differences. More negotiations between parliamentarians and cabinet ministers in a Norwegian seem to take place in parliament. In Denmark they take place inside the ministries, and is support by an informal yet highly institutionalized practice of legislative deals between government and opposition parties. For explanation of such differences, the similarity of the two cases may become useful. The paper finally discusses the impact of its result for the study of powers of legislative committees for minority governments, and more broadly.