Who trusts the government? Coalition and opposition shadowing through legislative committees in multiparty presidential democracies.

Legislatures as lawmaking institutions delegate policymaking authority to the executive branch, and the committee system serves as a mechanism for the legislature to monitor this delegation to the executive. Both opposition as well as coalition party caucuses face incentives to monitor executive departments. In pure presidential systems, the absence of the confidence vote endows both the legislature and its committee system with an increased importance as a locus of contestation of government policy as compared to its parliamentary counterparts. The role of the committee system in policy monitoring by the legislature in presidential systems has remained understudied, especially from a comparative perspective. Using an original dataset of cabinets and committee chairpersons covering 8 multiparty presidential democracies across 3 continents, I find that, while both opposition shadowing as well as coalition shadowing are negatively impacted by the seat share of the minister’s party, opposition shadowing is a function of the degree to which the minister’s party engages in clientelism in combination with its local organizational strength, whereas coalition shadowing is a function of the ideological distance between the minister’s party and the opposition as well as portfolio prestige.