How do parties negotiate in uncertain times? Comparison of adoption of party pledges of ANO into coalition agreements of Andrej Babiš first and third government

The paper is theoretically rooted in the pledge fulfilment approach to the party mandate model that basically expect that political parties formulate their manifesto pledges to fulfill them once in government, and after election, during the coalition negotiations, they adopt their pledges to coalition agreements to have higher chance of their fulfilment. Many authors point to the limitations of theoretical expectations connected to the party mandate model and show, what factors can reduce the ability of government parties to fulfil their pledges. However, no study has been focused on possible effect of general international and political uncertainty that political parties perceive after the 2020, including the Covid19 pandemy, invasion of Russia to Ukraine, and unpredictable behavior of USA under second Trump’s presidency. I expect that the generally unpredictable environment may lead to 1) decreased willingness of politial parties to make clearcut pledges in party election manifestos, and 2) to higher caution in formulation of common government pledges in coalition agreement. I will test the two expectations with the analysis of pledges ANO, the Prime ministerial party of two Czech governments (Babiš II, Babiš III) that are similar in important characteristics (same dominant Prime Ministerial party, same Prime Ministers, coalition government, small coalition partners), but differ in time of government negotiations (one in 2018, second in 2025). I will firstly focus on the structure of manifestos, especially on the formulation of the pledges in objective and subjetive way, expecting that the latter manifesto is formulated more subjectively (so that the pledge fulfilment is hard to identify). Then, I will focus on adoption of the pledges to the coalition agreement – the percentage of totally adopted and partially adopted pledges, and the percentage of objective/subjective pledges, expecting that for the newer coalition agreement, the party adopted the strategy of being rather cautious and adopting higher percentage of subjective pledges, and higher percentage of partially adopted pledges (ie. changed from their original meaning). The paper will not only bring new information about the strategy of ANO, the dominant party in Czech party system regarding its manifesto content and coalition negotiations, it also aims to bring new light on the question, how parties adapt their strategies related to party mandate fulfilment in situations when the fulfilment is uncertain from the beginning.