Many studies have analysed what could motivate centre-right governments to develop progressive family policies, given their historically traditionalist ideology. Updating classic institutionalist accounts, this article expands the focus beyond centre-right parties formally in charge. It argues that in coalition and minority governments, partisan veto players may act as agenda-setters, design policy reforms and successfully exert pressure to approve them through three mechanisms: agreements for government formation, conditions for government survival and bureaucratic continuity. Drawing on novel empirical data from interviews and document analysis, this article applies deductive process tracing to analyse the German parental allowance reform of 2006 and the Spanish 2017 paternity leave extension. The findings complement existing studies that focus on the agency of centre-right parties as ‘protagonists’ of these reforms, arguing that in some cases they have instead ‘consented’ to reforms proposed and supported by other parties.

Recent research suggests that party leaders can strategically impact the perceived left–right position of their parties by changing their selective emphasis on certain issues. We suggest that a party's ideological image can also be altered by the portfolio allocation of the coalition government in which the party participates. By controlling a portfolio, the party will have a more direct influence on the related issue and will frequently communicate the party's issue position publicly, thereby cultivating a perception of strong emphasis on the related issue. We run a cross-national party-level analysis showing that portfolio allocation matters with regard to the importance of the subdimensions for the general left–right dimension. In particular, the influence of sociocultural stances depends on the share of sociocultural portfolios. In addition, we show that the mechanism does not apply at the beginning of a government's tenure, but only after a year or longer in office.

In coalition governments, parties need to agree on a common policy position. Whose preferences prevail? The proportionality hypothesis, the idea that coalition partners’ influence on policy is proportional to their share of seats, has been used widely in the literature on democratic representation, ideological congruence, and coalition politics. In my analysis of competing theories aimed at determining what influences policy compromise in multiparty governments, I reject the proportionality hypothesis. My results suggest instead that coalition partners exert equal influence on policy compromises, independent of their number of seats. More extensive analysis also provides evidence for increased party influence on policies when the party is the formateur or closer to the parliamentary median, ceteris paribus. As a by-product of my analysis, I provide a simple and better proxy for measuring a government's position when this position is not directly observable.

Multiparty governments are based on delegation and compromises but, at the same time, coalition parties have at their disposal several legislative instruments to keep tabs on their partners. Whereas previous studies focused on policy divisiveness and issue salience as main factors able to explain parliamentary scrutiny, in this article we suggest uncertainty as a complementary factor. In particular, we theorize that the use of parliamentary questions (PQs) is a function not only of policy characteristics but also of actors involved in coalition governance. When ministers increase intra-coalition uncertainty, cabinet parties use PQs to extract information from ministers and to reduce uncertainty in policy implementation. Statistical analyses of all written and oral parliamentary questions in the Italian Chamber of Deputies between 2006 and 2018 support our main hypothesis that when intra-coalition uncertainty increases, coalition parties ask more questions of ‘hostile’ ministers.

The article investigates whether and to what extent the welfare policies of Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRPs) vary in diverse government coalitions. Relying on a multidimensional framework differentiating coalitional politics along the welfare size and deservingness dimension, we conduct a comparative case study analysing welfare reforms of the ‘standard’ centre-right/PRRP government coalition ÖVP-FPÖ in Austria and the ‘new’ populist government coalition M5S-Lega in Italy. We find that both PRRPs do not promote pro-welfare policies in general, but rather opt for selective expansion of benefits for ‘makers’, while aiming at retrenching benefits for ‘takers’. This welfare strategy includes pensioners and male breadwinner families but excludes migrants or long-term unemployed. The analysis furthermore shows that the central line of conflict with the centre-right ÖVP is mostly about the size of welfare policies, especially for ‘deserving’ citizens, while with the socially more left-leaning M5S it is rather centred around the deservingness dimension, e.g., benefits for takers. These results offer a more fine-grained understanding of the PRRPs’ welfare agenda and their coalitional welfare politics in office.

Law-making in most parliamentary democracies is dominated by the executive. Yet so far, all research has focused on the parliamentary stage of law-making. Studies suggest that the changes to bills submitted by coalition governments are the result of coalition policies dealing with the agency loss caused by ministerial drift. This is puzzling because it is already easier and more effective for coalition parties to attempt to change the bills in the executive phase than in the parliamentary one. The article aims to close the knowledge gap, and it quantitatively explores the factors that facilitate changes during the understudied executive phase on case study of the Czech Republic. Analysis reveals that government bills are altered more during the executive phase than the parliamentary phase. While we find no significant impact caused by the distance to coalition compromise, the saliency of a bill for coalition partners has a negative influence on the ratio of changes.

While coalition agreements are significant in structuring government behaviour, their comprehensiveness varies considerably across cabinets. We argue that the average correspondence between parties' priorities and portfolio allocation is important in explaining the comprehensiveness of coalition agreements because coalition parties that have obtained their preferred portfolios have less incentive to negotiate a detailed coalition agreement. We test our argument by combining newly collected data on coalition agreements drafted by 218 cabinets in 24 Western and Eastern European countries from 1945 to 2014 with data on the distribution of ministerial portfolios. We find that the shorter and less comprehensive the agreements, the higher the correspondence between parties' priorities and portfolio allocation. Our results have important implications for our understanding of coalition governments and the relationship between government formation and cabinet governance.

This article contributes to the literature on direct democracy and public spending in two ways. First, we explore how direct democratic institutions interact with a specific aspect of the representative system, the size of the governing coalition, to influence public spending. Second, based on newly collected data, we examine the relationship between three different direct democratic institutions, coalition size and public spending over the period from 1860 to 2015. Empirically, we find that initiatives increase the size of the public sector under single-party governments, but this positive relationship disappears as coalition size increases. In contrast, we find that financial referendums slow down the growth of public spending, while law referendums are not systematically associated with public spending. Finally, we find that the relationship between direct democratic institutions, coalition size and public spending does not change over time despite the long period under investigation.

In coalition governments, political parties are concerned not only with how many but also with which departments they control. The foreign ministry is among the most highly considered prizes in coalition negotiations. This article develops hypotheses to explain under which conditions the foreign ministry is likely to be allocated to a ‘junior coalition partner’. The factors that are hypothesized to affect the allocation are: the relative size of coalition parties; the proximity of their foreign policy positions; the party family of the junior coalition party; the salience of foreign policy to the coalition parties; and past allocations of the foreign ministry to junior coalition partners. Employing a crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis, the article demonstrates that although the conjunction of the junior partner being relatively large and it having led the foreign ministry in the past is not sufficient by itself, those two factors are very influential in the junior partner being allocated the foreign ministry.

The personalization of politics has become a central concern in political science. This is also true for parliamentary governments, where the Prime Minister has allegedly acquired an increasing relevance. Nonetheless, a key question remains unanswered: How can we estimate the Prime Minister Policy Autonomy (PMPA) in parliamentary governments? Moreover, what are the determinants of this autonomy? This article aims to answer these questions by proposing a novel and easily replicable index of PMPA, based on data from an analysis of Prime Ministers’ and members of Parliament’s parliamentary speeches, and specifically from cosine similarity analysis. In this article, we explore PMPA by focussing on two most different cases of coalition governments, Italy and Germany between 1994 and 2014. A multilevel regression analysis shows that coalition-related factors strongly influence PMPA, party-related factors are somewhat relevant, and the Prime Minister-related factor (its selectorate) does not have a significant impact on such autonomy.