Conditional Timing in Coalition Policymaking

Coalition policymaking concerns not only who decides what in which jurisdiction, but also when, how speedy and in what rhythm. Due to the limited time budget and the shadow of future elections, parties in charge of respective ministerial portfolios have to strategically organize their policy agendas to trade off between policy and electoral incentives in face of coalition partners who monitor and control ministerial autonomy. However, despite the burgeoning literature on coalition governance, the temporal dimension of ministerial agenda control is less well understood. We advance this research by proposing a model to account for the influence of time constraints on timing decisions of ministers in policy initiation. In this model, we distinguish between different timing strategies of policy initiation a ministerial party may possibly adopt, and identify in equilibrium a conditional postponing strategy by which ministers facing high scrutiny of coalition partners will postpone bill initiation till the end of the term. Our empirical examination lends support to our argument and further demonstrates that the timing strategy of ministers can also be influenced by coalition conflict and policy saliency of bills.