To be a junior minister: How junior ministers supervise their coalition partners

To be a junior minister: How junior ministers supervise their coalition partners There are two motivations for appointing junior ministers in coalition governments. One is to solve distributional conflicts among coalition partners because junior ministers’ posts are additional payoff allocated to the coalition partners. The other one sees junior ministers as an oversight mechanism to monitor the ministers and their policymaking activities (Lipsmeyer and Pierce 2011; Manow and Zorn 2004). The oversight takes place especially in those fields which are important to the party (Greene and Jensen 2016). Research on junior ministers as an oversight mechanism focused on who is more likely to be shadowed in terms of the party size, its position in the coalition, ideological distance from the center as well as the ministry in question; the relative saliency of the ministry in general and to specific parties in particular (Lipsmeyer and Pierce 2011; Thies 2001). The tacit assumption of this research is that once a rival junior minister is assigned, monitoring will take place. Research so far did not examine the actual activities of the junior ministers. Specifically, to what extent and under which conditions can they monitor the ministers? This paper aims at opening the black box of the activities of rival junior ministers. It examines junior ministers in Israel. The data includes information on all rival junior ministers from 1981 until 2020, interviews with former junior ministers, publicly available calendars of junior ministers and reports provided by junior ministers in the parliamentary committees. Preliminary findings suggest two types of rival junior ministers: junior ministers from the formateur party who do not receive a specific jurisdiction in the ministry and junior ministers from non-formateur parties who receive a specific jurisdiction in the ministry, in most cases a jurisdiction the party cares most about. The latter focuses more on limiting the minister’s autonomy in the specific jurisdiction they are in charge of. This suggests that for non-formateur parties, assigning rival junior ministers might be an even more powerful tool than expected. The junior ministers narrow the informational gap and receive agenda-setting power over jurisdictions within the ministry. If this is true, it has implications for understanding delegation costs in coalition governments. This is because it suggests that coalition partners should monitor the ministers and the junior ministers.