Policy as a Bargaining Outcome: Coalition Leverage and Pledge Fulfillment

Abstract

Abstract Which parties can deliver the policies that they promised? In multiparty contexts, parties must bargain to realize electoral promises. Prior work shows that parties influence policy change by using resources such as legislative seats, ministerial posts, and agenda, veto, and policing powers, while only theoretical work considers parties’ bargaining leverage from potentially changing the government. But for parties, fulfilling pledges (not incremental policy change) is paramount and they use their full leverage to achieve it. We offer and test a more complete and politically relevant account of multiparty policymaking that includes parties’ bargaining leverage through coalition options and focuses on the realization of distinct policy promises. We estimate regression analyses of pledge fulfillment in nine parliamentary democracies from 1974 to 2011 as well as local average treatment effects across a discontinuity and find that parties’ bargaining leverage from potential coalition change trumps conventional explanations for policy outcomes.