No opposition, no coalition. The effect of council-wide agreements on legislative voting behaviour in Dutch municipalities

One of the most well-established findings in legislative behaviour is that legislative voting behaviour is nearly always strongly structured by coalition-opposition dynamics. In fact, the fixed coalition-opposition dichotomy seems to have become the most important driver for political dynamics. Sometimes even more so than political substance of ideology. But what if the demarcation between coalition and opposition parties is removed as the basis setting for local democracy and replaced by a more open set-up? A number of Dutch municipal councils has in recent years attempted to break free of the traditional coalition-opposition dynamic. Instead of a council majority of parties supplying members of the local executive and agreeing on a coalition agreement that sets the agenda of the local executive and binds the coalition partners, these councils work with a council-wide agreement (raadsakkoord). Under such an agreement most or all parties of the council-wide agree on the broad lines of policy and/or the rules and norms under which decisions are made. After the 2018 elections 16% of municipal councils concluded a council-wide agreement. The goal of these council-wide agreements is that there is no demarcated coalition and opposition, which opens the political process up for issue-driven deliberation and voting. The goal of our paper is to test to what extent this is indeed the the case, if this changes voting behaviour, and wether or not this different approach to local politics produces a different political process. In this paper we will analyze how these council-wide agreements affect legislative voting behaviour. Considering the results of a survey amongst Dutch councilors and case studies we expect that in municipalities with council-wide agreements decisions are more often unanimous, that the average support for proposals is greater (broader?), that differences in voting behaviour are mostly determined by diverging political views rather than whether a party supplies members of the local executive and that parties are more likely to be part of the winning majority, and that the political process is therefore open to actual politics. We examine voting patterns in a representative sample of Dutch municipalities before and after they have implemented a council wide agreement to determine its effect. We also compare voting in a set of municipalities that have such a council wide agreement with a comparable municipalities that do not have such an agreement. In doing so, our paper adds to the broader literature on legislative behaviour: specifically, whether the dominance of the division between coalition and opposition that we can see in nearly all legislatures in all countries can be diminished through political choice or whether it is an inevitable fact of political life.