High Politics in the Low Countries

An Empirical Study of Coalition Agreements in Belgium and The Netherlands

Arco I. Timmermans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138709874
• eBook ISBN: 9781351775861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This title was first published in 2003.This informative text deals with the emergence of coalition agreements, their contents, the problem of enforcement and with the question of whether or not the functions are performed in practice. It explores the idea that policy bargaining in government formation is not just an isolated process, but that it is a real chance for parties to deal with substantive and controversial issues at an early stage. The coalition agreements in which these issues are incorporated have become important in most multiparty systems, but they have received little attention in political science research. This book argues that more systematic attention for these institutional variables is highly useful in coalition research because it helps to explain processes and outcome in coalition politics.

Chapter 1
Government Formation and Beyond: An Empirical Study

One of the most obvious questions someone could ask about coalition governments is what these governments do. Since coalitions began to be studied in the early 1960s, however, this question has hardly been addressed in a systematic way. Most of the time, attention in coalition research was focused on the formation of coalitions and on their end, and both were the subject of deductive theory building based on the assumptions of rational choice.

The most extensively studied element of coalition politics was government formation. Theories on this subject evolved from variations of Riker’s straightforward size principle (1962) to sophisticated approaches dealing with bargaining strategies and the different kinds of results they may yield. The other challenge that drove theorists in the same intellectual comer was to explain the stability and duration of coalitions (see Warwick, 1994 and Laver and Shepsle, 1996 for useful discussions of this literature). There has been attention for aspects of the life of governments, but this has formed a research world apart, the domain of country specialists and comparativists going into entirely different questions not specific to coalition governments (see for example Blondel, 1988; Blondel and Müller-Rommel, 1993; Blondel and Cotta, 1996). The consequence of this remarkable research landscape is that the answers to the question what happens during the life of coalition governments still contain a good deal of speculation.

Linking Coalition Birth to Life: Coalition Agreements

Bargaining between parties is a key element of coalition government. Interparty bargaining never stops, and this is an intriguing point for students of coalition governments. As said, government formation often is taken as the focal point in studies of coalition bargaining. But if government formation is the point of departure in analysis, it need not also be the end point. Coalition agreements link government formation to government life. Parties all calculate their policy payoffs before government arrangements are definitive and ratified, but these payoffs concern intentions that begin to have a substantive meaning only after the government has taken office. Then, bargaining either may no longer be necessary because all policy disputes were settled, or bargaining may go on, and usually this is what happens.

From country reports we know that there is variation in the time and energy devoted to policy negotiations during government formation. This means, that coalition agreements, the written documents containing all kinds of intentions on coalition policy, may also vary between coalitions and between countries.

A minimum position with respect to the actual meaning of such coalition agreements is taken by Laver and Schofield in their book Multiparty Government (1990). They argue that interparty policy negotiations have a symbolic meaning, confirming the common viewpoints rather than that they are organized to establish agreement on policy conflicts. If parties want to form a coalition, they argue, why would they bother in advance about policy conflicts and constrain themselves by formulating all kinds of commitment? Luebbert (1986) asserts that policy negotiations during government formation have mainly intraparty purposes. Party leaders are seen to use these negotiations to keep their followers happy.

But does this minimum position provide an adequate picture of the process and results of policy negotiations in coalition formation? Policy negotiations during government formation also can be seen in a different way. In this alternative view, less common in coalition research and first presented by Peterson et al. (1983), government formation is an arena par excellence for bargaining on coalition policy. The authors illustrate their argument with examples from Belgium and the Netherlands, two typical coalition systems. In the government formation arena, discussions between party leaders and other party spokespeople can be more informal and are constrained less by institutional rules of policy making, and they are also less exposed to the broader public. This may facilitate making deals on coalition policy, though negotiators need to keep an open line with followers to avoid problems of legitimacy later on.

Thus conceived as a bargaining opportunity, parties are likely to focus their attention in government formation on a limited set of issues – they emphasize the subjects that are most salient to them. A question following from this is to what degree of specificity and how persistently policy viewpoints are upheld. In the first comparative empirical study of coalition governments in Western European countries, Browne and Dreijmanis (1982: 349–250) depicted policy negotiations as a process ‘to apportion influence among the partners and establish an initial condition of programmatic unity among them.’ Parties may use principles and ideological profiles as the input for such negotiations, but they must translate this to more or less concrete policy positions. For this reason, parties may concentrate on issues that are salient and on which they have disagreement. Policy conflicts not only arise during government formation; they also may have emerged earlier, during the previous government and even may have caused coalition collapse. Particularly in this last situation, parties mistrust each other and will feel a need to make clear deals.

Aim and Organization of This Book

The second view of policy bargaining is based on observations about politics in the Netherlands and Belgium, but it may have more general relevance. The question that follows when taking manifest policy disputes in government formation as the point of departure, is to what extent such conflicts are really resolved before the government takes office. And how does this become visible in the coalition agreement as the output of government formation? Bargaining may result in compromises, but these may take different forms and be negotiated one by one or in packages in which different issues are linked. And the deals or compromises may be substantive or procedural, specific or general, and clear or ambiguous. The political formulas chosen by parties reflect the degree to which dispute was resolved during government formation.

When agreements made on controversial issues are on the government agenda, different things may happen. They may be implemented directly or become the object of further coalition bargaining. They even may be forgotten, though this is not likely for issues that were salient to most or all parties. Deals may increase efficiency of decision making by removing the conflict element, but they may also generate new trouble in the coalition. Thus, coalition agreements may have different effects during the life of governments. These effects may relate to the types of deals, but they may also be determined by the ways in which coalitions organize the policy making process. Thus far, none of these possible effects nor their conditions have been investigated in coalition research.

Such an empirical investigation is the aim of this study. The general point of departure is that coalition agreements link government formation to government life. The nature of negotiations on coalition agreements and their results may vary between countries with different party systems and institutional rules influencing government formation. For this reason, the first thing to consider is how large this variation in the practice of writing coalition agreements is in Western Europe. Where do we find coalition agreements? How long are these documents, and how is variation in these properties related to coalition features, or to country characteristics? Recent empirical work on the general features of coalition agreements in different countries helps to answer this question, which is central in chapter 2.

Once this tour d’horizon of coalition agreements is done, it is possible to move on to more specific questions about the functions of agreements. What is written down in coalition agreements is likely to reflect the way in which parties perceive policy bargaining during government formation. As said, in coalition research, two opposite views of policy agreements exist, and chapter 3 presents these views in the literature on coalition politics. What are the possible functions of coalition agreements? And what conditions may be relevant for performance of these functions during the life of governments? Here, the key issue is the problem of enforcement. In this chapter, the central concepts and a number of hypotheses on effects of types of deals are presented.

Chapter 4 contains an introduction to the case studies dealing with the questions on effects of coalition agreements. A case study approach is chosen in this book to explore the variation in the ways coalition parties have dealt with controversial issues in government formation and beyond. Five coalition governments are studied: two from Belgium in the 1970s, two from the Netherlands in the 1980s, and one other Dutch coalition in the 1990s. For each coalition government, the disputed issues and the deals on them in government formation are analyzed, the effects of these deals in terms of conflict prevention and implementation, and the favourable or unfavourable conditions for enforcement that may help explain effects. Except for impressionistic accounts in the media, we still know little about the effects of coalition agreements in these two countries, and for this reason each case is considered extensively. This is done in the chapters 5 through 9.

In chapter 10, these findings from the cases are taken together, and the patterns in types of deals, their effects, and enforcement conditions are examined. What types of arrangements on policy conflicts ensue in what policy fields? Is there a pattern to be found in the performance of the substantive functions of coalition agreements? Are there differences between cases, or between countries – what government was most successful and which one was least able to keep the peace and enhance efficiency of decisions making through the coalition agreement? If the effects were failure, in what arenas has this failure occurred? And what can be said about the different conditions that were assumed to be relevant to enforcement? What is the interplay between structural properties of coalitions and processes within these coalitions?

There are thus many questions to be asked about coalition agreements, and this book will not give definitive answers. This study is meant to begin addressing empirical questions about coalition governments beyond their formation, and to show that a focus on the high politics of controversial issues is a useful one. The empirical scope of the study is Belgium and the Netherlands, the two low countries with a tradition of coalition governments. The political tradition in both these countries is one of accommodation and consensus (Lijphart, 1968; 1999), of which coalition agreements are a more recent expression. None the less, as the next chapter will show, coalition governments are on the rise in Western Europe, and indeed also in many countries outside Europe. This may indicate that the theme and approach developed in this book may have a more general relevance for the study of multiparty government.

Chapter 2
Bargaining, Policy, and Coalition Agreements

Introduction

Almost all Western European countries, and an increasing number of countries outside Western Europe, have experience with coalition government. Coalition government is a form of government in which two or more political parties form the executive – if possible until the next elections. Spain and the United Kingdom are the only countries in Western Europe without a record of coalition government since 1945. In all other Western European countries, coalition governments have been in office for some or most of the time. In Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland, multi party government prevails. Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland never had a single party government since 1945.

These government coalitions do not always control a stable parliamentary majority. Minority coalition governments emerge in most of the countries just mentioned. In countries such as Denmark and Finland they are even frequent. Minority coalitions may be the result of a government crisis and be given caretaker status, or they may be formed after elections and be meant to survive until the end of the Constitutional term in office. In the second case, they are vulnerable because they depend on the passive or active support of one or more other parties in parliament. Such coalitions need to build majority support, and this can be done ad hoc or through a support agreement put together before or after the coalition is formed. This was done for example in 1996 in Spain, when the People’s Party formed a single party minority government after the Social Democrats were defeated in the elections. Support agreements may reduce political risks, but they do not always give the government coalition a stable majority. Another situation occurring in Western Europe is that a party with an absolute majority takes other parties on board. Such large coalition governments are less vulnerable, but they also are more exceptional. Thus, coalition governments emerge in majority and minority situations, and they consist of parties controlling a stable majority in parliament, or they are composed of parties that need to construct such a majority during their term in office.

Coalition agreements, the documents containing coalition policy intentions, are less widespread than coalition governments. Not all coalition governments have such agreements. Where and under what conditions are coalition agreements made in multi party systems?

This chapter deals with this question. It is about the context in which coalition agreements emerge. It presents insights from research on coalition governments that are useful for drawing up this context – the countries and cases in which parties negotiate a coalition agreement. Some of these insights are based on theory, and some are empirical. The first section gives a brief overview of coalition research from its embryonic stage onwards. The conclusion to be drawn from this overview is clear: theoretical contributions have much to say about the systemic context of coalition bargaining and about coalition government formation, but they do not really tell us what happens during the life of coalition governments, and they are even more silent about coalition agreements and the role they may play. Section two provides the context of coalition agreement production in theoretical terms: it is about properties of bargaining systems in which parties coalesce. Section three takes these properties as a point of departure in an empirical tour d’horizon of coalition agreements. What countries have coalition agreements, and what are the features of agreements across these countries? For these questions, findings from recent comparative empirical work on coalition governance are useful.

A Brief History of Coalition Research

Given the prominence of coalition government in Western Europe, it is not surprising that this type of government has obtained much attention from political scientists. This attention emerged in the 1960s, and was strongly driven by game theory and rational choice theory. The main object of theoretical attention was the formation of coalition governments, followed by coalition stability. Initially, the focus was on the set of possible coalitions that could be formed on the basis of numerical conditions – the size of parties represented in parliament. The underlying assumption borrowed from rational choice theory was that parties try to form party combinations that are as small as possible, and involve not more power sharing than needed to control a majority. In such coalitions, each party seeks to maximize its gains from political trade. Such coalitions could take different forms. First, they could be minimal winning, that is, be a combination in which each party is indispensable for a parliamentary majority (Riker, 1962). Or they could be minimum winning – the smallest possible combination beyond 50 percent of the parliamentary seats (Gamson, 1961; Riker, 1962). Or they could contain the minimal number of parties necessary for a parliamentary majority (Leiserson, 1968).

These size based approaches appeared not to be very successful in explaining coalition formation and duration in the real world. Not more than about one third of all coalitions that were formed, could be accounted for by any of these theories. A key point of critique was that they ignored ideology and policy, and more refined theories incorporating these elements emerged in the early 1970s. The central characteristic of this second generation of coalition theory was that the positions of parties were mapped onto a policy dimension, the Left-Right scale. In one theory, the assumption was that coalitions are not only minimal winning but also contain parties that are each other’s ideological neighbours (Axelrod, 1970). In another theory, the prediction was that combinations occur in which the partners have a minimal ideological range – reducing the distance between policy intentions that the coalition parties need to bridge (De Swaan, 1973). These contributions increased the empirical relevance of coalition theory. In addition to coalition formation, scholars considered coalition stability and duration. The theoretical assumptions were largely similar to the ones guiding coalition formation theory, and were based on size and ideological attributes of coalitions. Coalitions of minimal size and minimal ideological heterogeneity were expected to be most durable (Dodd, 1976; Sanders and Herman, 1977; Warwick, 1979). Thus, two different phenomena, coalition formation and coalition duration, were accounted for by essentially the same factors.

In the 1980s, these theories in turn were challenged. Though the explanatory power of deductive coalition theory focusing on government formation had increased, it was beginning to be considered too formal and static. According to this critique, coalition politics was depicted too much as a game played at one fixed point in time, and the end as something that ‘just happened’, without being clear why for example on Friday 13th and not at some other moment. What happens with coalition governments was seen to be not just a matter of their structural attributes (size, ideological homogeneity) but also of shocks and unpredictable events (Browne, Frendreis and Gleiber, 1986). Thus more attention was given to the dynamic character of coalition politics (Browne and Franklin, 1986; Strom, 1984; 1990). A second point...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 Government Formation and Beyond: An Empirical Study
• 2 Bargaining, Policy, and Coalition Agreements
• 3 Functions and Effects of Coalition Agreements
• 4 Case Studies: Coalitions in Belgium and the Netherlands
• 5 The Leburton Government (1973–74)
• 6 The Tindemans V Government (1977–78)
• 7 The Van Agt II Government (1981–82)
• 8 The Lubbers I Government (1982–86)
• 9 The Kok I Government (1994–98)
• 10 The High Politics of Coalition Agreements
• Bibliography
• Index