Policy at the Portfolio Boundaries: Interministerial Coordination and Legislative Design in Germany

In parliamentary systems, much of the law’s substantive content is crafted inside ministries through primary and secondary legislation. While this delegation makes ministerial interaction central to policy outcomes, we still know too little about how relations and power asymmetries between ministries shape the scope and complexity of legislation. We study interministerial coordination in Germany’s federal government using a mixed-methods design and a novel corpus of ministerial bills and decrees (1980–2024). First, we map coordination across portfolio lines by visualizing interministerial cooperation networks, identifying which ministries occupy central coordinating positions and which recurrently act as clearance and veto players. Second, we link these patterns to legislative design using text-as-data measures of complexity, including length, structural density (articles/paragraphs), cross-references, and topical breadth. To specify mechanisms, we draw on semi-structured interviews with senior officials and desk officers and trace routines of agenda setting, drafting, and clearance. The qualitative evidence clarifies the conditions under which ministerial preferences are translated into legal text. The paper contributes to research on ministerial politics and ministerial logics by showing how power relations between ministries are enacted in day-to-day drafting and by offering a template for comparative studies of bureaucratic influence on legislative complexity beyond Germany.