Analysis of the Effect of Ministers‘ Political and Personal Characteristics on Their Ability to Fulfil Their Party Pledges

The ability of political parties to fulfil what they promised to voters indicates the quality of democracy in a given country. Personal and political characteristics of politicians were found to influence the selection and survival of ministers in coalition governments. Politically experienced ministers are also expected to be more successful in pushing their party policy into reality. It was repeatedly confirmed that pledges have greater odds of fulfilment if the promising party has the correspondig ministerial protfolio. In the paper, I follow the principal-agent approach and expect that the ministers act as the agents of their nominating parties. I argue that the personal characteristics and previous political experiences of ministers have the impact on the loyalty of ministers regarding their parties, and their technical ability to push their party pledges. The analysis is done on the dataset of pledges of coalition parties in three governments of the Czech Republic (created after 2006, 2010, and 2013 elections) that are additioned by the personal and political data of ministers within these governments. The analysis connects the possesing of the ministry with the individual data of ministers and shows that the features that usually predict the more successful ministers (such as, age, gender, previous political experience at local, parliamentary and government level) also lead to the better effectiveness in party pledge fulfilment. The paper adds the impact on personal features of individual ministers in pledge fulfilment studied and shows that the pledge fulfilment is not only influenced by institutions or parties. As well, the individual ministers who play their rules in complex policy struggles have the irreplacebla impact on the process and its results.