Coalition Policy-Making under Constraints: Examining the Role of Preferences and Institutions

While much has been written about the formation and termination of coalitions, com-paratively little attention has been paid to the policy output of multiparty governments. The present study attempts to narrow this research gap by analysing policy-making in three Austrian coalition governments between 1999 and 2008. Drawing on the party mandate literature, a manually coded textual analysis of election manifestos is con-ducted that yields a dataset containing over 1,100 pledges. The fulfilment of these pledges is taken as the dependent variable in a multivariate analysis. The results indi-cate that institutional determinants (adoption in the coalition agreement, ministerial control, and policy status quo) significantly influence the chances of pledge fulfilment and thus present a powerful predictor of coalition policy output. By contrast, factors related to parties ’ preferences (consensus between parties, policy distance, pledge sal-iency, and majority support in parliament) do not have an impact. In parliamentary democracies with proportional electoral systems, the necessity to form coalition governments regularly subjects the translation of party plat-forms into government policy to the uncertainties of inter-party bargaining