Issue and budget attention at the regional level: How preferences translate into expenses

Are parties’ policy preferences translated into government action? Numerous studies have analysed pledge fulfilment in various forms at the national level. Yet, we know comparatively little about how parties’ preferences are translated into government action at the regional level. This is surprising considering the vast number of legal competences and intertwined policymaking structure in federal countries. In this paper, we strive to close this gap in the literature by analysing how issue attention in regional election manifestos and the coalition agreements are translated into the budget as a prerequisite for government action. First, we expect that the varying degree of government parties’ attention to issues in coalition agreements is reflected in their budget decisions. Secondly, we expect that government parties allocate a higher budget to those issues that are more important to them. We assess the influence of issue attention in parties’ election manifestos and coalition agreements on governments’ budget allocations by building on a novel data set covering regional parties' issue attention in election manifestos and coalition agreements, as well as patterns of regional portfolio allocation, in Austria and Germany (1991-2019). We test our hypotheses by relying on a dictionary approach to measure regional political actors’ issue attention and multi-level linear regression analyses. Our results will have important implications for our understanding of (coalition) policymaking at the subnational level.