From Electoral Pledges to Coalition Agreements: How Coalition Government Shapes the Programmes-To-Policy Linkage

The extent to which a party’s electoral promises translate into effective policies once it has come to power is key to modern democracies’ legitimization (Mansbridge 2003). During electoral campaigns, parties and their candidates are expected to aggregate sets of policies and to commit to implement them, if supported by a majority of voters. This “programme-to-policy linkage” (Thomson et al, 2017) is essential to ensure that democratic elections, as a collective choice mechanism, shape policies. In parliamentary systems, however, elections most of the time result in coalition governments, which involve an additional stage in the process linking electoral promises to policy: the formulation of a coalition agreement. This intermediate stage makes it difficult to establish for what parties can be held accountable for – the electoral pledges formulated in their party manifestos or the common agenda they agreed upon in the coalition agreement. The majority of the studies dealing with pledge fulfillment focuses on what explains pledge fulfillment either based on so-called post-electoral pledges (mainly in coalition agreements) or, which is mostly the case, on electoral pledges in party manifestos. Surprisingly, however, little is known about the degree of overlap between both, and more precisely on the conditions under which electoral pledges are included into coalition agreements. This linkage is topical from the point of view of representation and mandate responsiveness: it seems difficult to anticipate coalition negotiations in the run-up to the elections and voters can rely only on electoral manifestos when making their electoral choice. That is why evaluating pledge fulfillment through the lens of the implementation of the coalition agreement does not go without a loss, or at least a dilution of the electoral connection. At the same time, the fulfillment of electoral pledges may not be fully understood without taking into account the content of the coalition agreement. We seek to contribute to bridge this gap by analyzing the inclusion of electoral pledges into the coalition agreements of German governments (2002-2017): how many pledges are taken up into the agreement and what kind of pledge- and party-specific factors influence this? We analyze our research question by drawing on an original data set based on pledges made by the German governing parties in their legislative manifestos between 2002 and 2017, and their inclusion in the corresponding coalition agreements. We examine in particular how the electoral power of the party, its ideological proximity to the coalition partner on the given issue, as well as issue salience and issue-ownership affect the likelihood for a pledge to be included in the coalition agreement.