Party campaign statements and portfolio allocation in coalition governments

Abstract

Which party controls which cabinet posts is an important determinant of how multi-party governments work. Existing research shows that parties’ attention to policy domains in election manifestos is a key predictor of portfolio allocation. However, election manifestos are broad documents and typically published months before an election. This research note argues that policy emphasis in the last few weeks before the election matters for portfolio allocation, because parties can focus their message, react to exogenous events and use campaign communication as a commitment device. A test of this argument makes use of a novel dataset on party representatives’ campaign statements. The findings show that the policy focus of campaign statements, especially those stating positions rather than referring to valence, predicts who will control a ministerial portfolio associated with the respective policy domain.

Keywords:

• Coalition formation
• portfolio allocation
• campaign communication
• issue salience

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this manuscript were presented at the Advances in Coalition Research: A Dynamic and Comparative Perspective workshop at the University of Vienna and the 2021 Annual Conference of the Political Studies Association of Ireland. We thank all participants for their valuable feedback and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding

This study was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), DE 1667/4-3.

Notes

1 The number of observations results from the product of the number of coalition parties and the number of portfolios, summed up over the 18 post-electoral government formation contexts studied.

2 For a list of the policy areas and the associated coding categories, see Online Appendix 2. For each party-election unit, we normalise each salience measure (so that the total number of statements in the denominator refers to statements in categories that are matched with portfolios).

3 We treat the set of portfolios in each government as given.

4 Data and code to replicate the analyses are available at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VXP23S

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Däubler

Thomas Däubler is Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow at University College Dublin. His main research interests include electoral systems, legislative politics and political parties. He has published in the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research and the Journal of Politics, among others. [[email protected]]

Marc Debus

Marc Debus is Professor of Political Science (Comparative Government) at the University of Mannheim. His research interests include decision-making processes of voters and party representatives, party politics, legislative behaviour and coalition politics. He has published in the European Journal of Political Research, the Journal of Politics and Political Science Research and Methods, among others. [[email protected]]

Alejandro Ecker

Alejandro Ecker is Junior Professor of Politics and Communication at Heidelberg University. His research focuses on the effects of political institutions on multi-party governments, political parties and individual politicians and their consequences for citizen behaviour and voter attitudes. He has published in the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research and Public Choice, among others. [[email protected]]