628189
research-article2016
CPSXXX10.1177/0010414016628189Comparative Political StudiesFernandes et al.
Article
Wary Partners:
Strategic Portfolio
Allocation and
Coalition Governance
in Parliamentary
Democracies
Comparative Political Studies
1­–31
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0010414016628189
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Jorge M. Fernandes1, Florian Meinfelder1,
and Catherine Moury2
Abstract
Are political parties willing to partially forgo their office and policy goals
to maximize their coalition governance capacities? Multiparty governments
are plagued with preference heterogeneity and uncertainty about policy
outcomes. In this article, we argue that parties choose to make a strategic
allocation of portfolios to curb delegation perils. They use portfolios with
jurisdiction overlaps to shadow each other at the ministerial level. We
define a wary partners’ situation when different parties control the portfolios
that form a jurisdiction combination. We test this hypothesis for 12
West European parliamentary democracies since 1945. Our contribution
conjugates a Monte Carlo simulation, which estimates whether real-world
distribution differs significantly from expected allocation under nonstrategic
behavior, with in-depth interviews with more than 40 former ministers.
Results show that wary partners are used extensively as coalition governance
mechanisms, particularly because of their capacity to curb information
asymmetries and to avoid interministerial gridlock.
1University
2New
of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany
University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
Corresponding Author:
Jorge M. Fernandes, University of Bamberg, Feldkirchenstrassee 21, 96045 Bamberg,
Germany.
Email: [email protected]
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2
Comparative Political Studies 
Keywords
coalitions, delegation, ministers, political parties, Monte Carlo estimation
Introduction
Are political parties willing to partially forgo their office- and policy-seeking
goals to maximize their coalition governance capacities? Do parties prefer to
relinquish important portfolios to optimize an executive internal organization
that helps them keep tabs on their partners? In this article, we address these
research questions by looking at how the strategic allocation of senior portfolios heightens mutual oversight capacities in coalition governments in
European parliamentary democracies.
By joining the executive, political parties have the opportunity to maximize their office and policy goals simultaneously (Strøm, 1990). Office payoffs offer parties the possibility to reward their loyal members with patronage
benefits (Kopecký & Mair, 2012). They are instrumental to shape public
policy and to help parties deliver benefits to their constituents. In single-party
governments, political parties are the organizational unit that helps create a
unified chain of delegation with minimal potential for agency loss (Müller,
2000; Strøm, 1990). Hence, parties can maximize office and policy goals and
do not have to make any concessions in portfolio allocation to deal with delegation perils.
Conversely, coalition governments face important delegation perils that
political parties have to consider in the allocation of office and policy payoffs
(Strøm, Müller, & Smith, 2010). First, partners have heterogeneous preferences, which heightens transaction costs for collective decision making
(Martin & Vanberg, 2014). Second, individual coalition members (ministers,
junior ministers) have incentives to shirk from the coalition median and to
focus on delivering benefits to their own party or even to illicit information
from their party and seek personal benefits (Andeweg & Timmermans, 2008;
Dewan & Hortala-Vallve, 2011). Finally, coalitions have to deal with higher
uncertainty levels. At any point of the inter-election period, one of the coalition partners might have internal or exogenous incentives to defect from the
government equilibrium. To deal with these problems, coalition partners promote institutional arrangements that help them curb delegation perils. Notably,
the strategic placement of junior ministers (Thies, 2001) and the usage of legislative committees (Carroll & Cox, 2012; Martin & Vanberg, 2011) stand out
as privileged arenas for parties to keep tabs on coalition partners.
In this article, we explore a coalition governance mechanism that has been
theoretically and empirically overlooked in the extant comparative literature:
the strategic assignment of ministers from different coalition parties to
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3
ministries with overlapping jurisdictions.1 Our argument builds on the
assumption that in most executives there are ministerial arenas with neighboring jurisdictions that are inherently forced to share information and coordinate policy making.2 That, in return, offers a privileged arena for parties to
use their ministers (agents) to keep tabs on fellow ministers by making sure
that they deliver policy-benefits to the median position of the coalition.
Our expectation is that, in addition to their classic office and policy goals,
coalition partners incorporate strategic governance considerations in coalition bargaining. Parties have to make hard choices. In this article, we contend
that parties may choose to forgo portfolios that are more valuable, because
they carry higher intrinsic office and policy influence, in exchange for an
optimal allocation of portfolios that maximizes oversight. We call such
arrangement wary partners. We analyze three sets of neighboring jurisdictions—Finance and Economy, Justice and Interior, Foreign Affairs and
Defense—in 12 West European democracies since 1945.
To examine the usage of wary partners in parliamentary democracies, this
article uses a mixed-method approach, which helps us to associate generalizable results with the need to examine the micro-foundations of our argument
by understanding why parties make the choices they do (Bäck & Dumont,
2007). First, we use a Monte Carlo (MC) approach to simulate the allocation
of portfolios under nonstrategic behavior. This simulation hinges on (a) proportionality allocation rules (Browne & Franklin, 1973) and (b) the relative
weight of each portfolio (Druckman & Warwick, 2005). Our MC simulation
considers that parties have only office- and policy-seeking considerations.
During bargaining rounds, parties take turns in choosing portfolios that are
more valuable and, consequently, more important for them (Warwick &
Druckman, 2006). Subsequently, we compare the MC estimator with the
actually observed real-world bargaining situations to understand whether
wary partners happen more often than one would expect under nonstrategic
behavior.
Second, we use interviews with more than 40 ministers and top civil servants in Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. These are instrumental in helping us understand the mechanics behind strategic portfolio
allocation for coalition governance. Our interviewees shed light on why parties choose wary partners in particular areas, how parties understand the role
of senior ministers as oversight mechanisms and, what is more, relative utility derived from this particular oversight mechanism compared with other
coalition governance.
Our findings point to a need to incorporate wary partners in the established
set of coalition governance mechanisms in parliamentary democracies. We
show a wealth of evidence suggesting that parties make strategic use
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Comparative Political Studies 
of portfolio allocation to create wary partners. If portfolio allocation were
nonstrategic and based only on office- and policy-seeking considerations, the
number of wary partners would be lower. However, we observe that strategic
allocation of portfolios is used extensively in several countries. Our interviews suggest that parties choose to assign ministers of different parties to
neighboring jurisdictions, because this offers an efficient and less costly institutional coalition governance mechanism to prevent gridlock in cabinet
meetings.
Delegation and Coalition Governance in
Parliamentary Democracies
Delegation is instrumental to make democracy work. Representative democracy would be unthinkable without the establishment of delegation relations
between voters, government officials, and civil servants (Müller, Bergman, &
Strøm, 2003). Delegation, however, is not cost free. There are inherent risks
associated with delegating power to an agent to act on one’s behalf, specifically, adverse selection and moral hazard (Kiewiet & McCubbins, 1991). The
former consists of a situation in which “a principal lacks information about
her agent’s skills and preferences” (Lupia, 2003, p. 43). Moral hazard happens because principals have only limited resources and time to keep tabs on
their agents (Strøm, 2000).
Agency loss, however, does not have to be inevitable. There are ex-ante
and ex-post institutional arrangements that help reduce the transaction costs
associated with real-world politics. According to North (1990), “institutions
. . . provide sufficient information for individuals to police deviations” (p.
57). Those institutions should help principals, not only “as communications
mechanisms that provide the information necessary to know when punishment is required” but also as “incentives for those individuals to carry out
punishment when called on to do so” (North, 1990, p. 57).
Ex-ante arrangements typically include candidate screening and contract
design. By screening candidates, principals search for “reliable signals of the
potential agents’ qualities and interests” (Müller, 2000, p. 327). Those signals
help level up information asymmetries between principals and agents
(Spence, 1974). In an increasingly complex policy environment, contract
design helps principals establish the action points and policies to be pursued
by the agent. In addition, contracts often include potential sanctions in case
of policy drifting, serving as a deterrence mechanism for shirking.
After the establishment of the delegation relationship, ex-post mechanisms help curb agency loss. Principals can hold regular meetings with their
agents to learn about their activities through “police patrol oversight.” Direct
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5
monitoring, however, is costly in that principals do not have the time or the
resources to obtain information about whether the agent is fulfilling her end
of the bargain (Lupia, 2003). Alternatively, principals can rely on “fire alarm
oversight” by using trustworthy third parties with a vested interest on the
matters directly related to the delegation relationships (McCubbins &
Schwartz, 1984).
In European parliamentary democracies, there are traditionally two types of
government: single-party and multiparty governments. They pose different
potential challenges in terms of agency loss. Single-party governments are efficient executive organizations, because of their “singular and hierarchical . . .
chain of delegation” (Strøm et al., 2010, p. 519), which helps reduce the likelihood of agency loss. Political parties are the organizational unit that helps contain agency loss by aligning preferences and reducing transaction costs in the
establishment of delegation relations between government members belonging
to the same party (Müller & Meyer, 2010; Strøm & Müller, 2008).3
Conversely, multiparty governments have more complicated power
arrangements. Because there is more than one party in government, the
agency loss risk increases significantly. Accordingly, ministers assume a dual
role as agents of their political party and of the government coalition
(Andeweg, 2000). This duality poses several challenges. First, holding a ministry offers an institutional channel to act opportunistically, that is, in disagreement with the coalition’s median preference. By and large, ministers
have direct access to crucial information resources, for example, through
daily contacts with civil servants and regular contacts with experts or lobbying groups (Berlinski, Dewan, & Dowding, 2012). In inherently uncertain
decision-making environments, this “makes it difficult for less-informed
cabinet members to ascertain the precise relationship between a draft and its
policy consequences” (Martin & Vanberg, 2004, p. 16).
Second, ministers often have constitutional competences to draft bills.
This is an important proposal right that shapes the potential outcomes of the
policy process (Romer & Rosenthal, 1978; McCarty, 2000). Ministers have
the capacity to constrain the menu of choices from the beginning of the legislative process (Cox & McCubbins, 2005). In addition to their capacity as
agenda-setters, ministers enjoy technical and informational advantages,
because of the inherent time and capacity constraints of cabinet meetings
(Martin & Vanberg, 2011). Ministers may also make a strategic choice not to
present a policy proposal, thwarting coalition partners from receiving previously agreed policy payoffs. Since coalition payoffs are not uniformly distributed over time, a minister from a party that has already received a large
benefit has decreasing incentives to deliver on her part of the deal toward the
end of the inter-election period (Strøm et al., 2010).
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Comparative Political Studies 
Delegation perils in coalition governments have been addressed extensively in the literature. For some authors, coalition partners simply accept the
fact that the party holding a particular ministry implements its preferred policy position. The well-known Laver and Shepsle (1996) model treats cabinet
ministers as “policy dictators” in their jurisdictions. Laver and Shepsle’s
model assumes that the division of labor among ministers is the rational
answer to the complexity and workload of the executive. Ministers not only
deal with the need to prepare legislation but also to follow up on its implementation (Dunleavy & Bastow, 2001). In Thies’ (2001) words, government
compartmentalization “requires that parties construct the coalitional contract
not as a set of issue-by-issue compromises . . . but as a logroll of party ideal
points across issues” (p. 583).
Recent literature challenges Laver and Shepsle (1996) by assuming that
parties establish a multiplicity of coalition governance institutions that help
them deal with agency loss (Falcó-Gimeno, 2014; Huber & MartinezGallardo, 2008; Indridason & Kam, 2008; Martin & Vanberg, 2004; Thies,
2001). Several institutional arrangements have been identified as serving as
ex-ante and ex-post controls (Strøm et al., 2010).
Drafting coalition agreements is a typical ex-ante mechanism. Parties
design contracts defining the “set of terms on which the cabinet is allowed to
take office” (Strøm, 1995, p. 74). According to Müller and Strøm (2008),
coalition agreements are important because they (a) address preference divergence, bringing parties together to an equilibrium point; (b) define who gets
what, outlining the distribution of constant-sum resources; and (c) reduce
uncertainty by giving a “script” of the term ahead. Empirical evidence shows
that agreements reduce ministerial leeway (Moury, 2013).
Thies (2001) explored the usage of junior ministers to help parties strategically shadowing coalition partners. Literature on junior ministers establishes that, when a coalition partner controls the ministerial portfolio, there is
a higher likelihood that a different coalition partner would control the junior
minister. According to Thies, the former have “ample incentives to report (at
least to their own parties) any behavior within the ministry that deviated from
the agreed-upon policy platform of the coalition, or any information that
might help the cabinet to deal with forthcoming ministerial proposals” (2001,
p. 585).
Legislative committees are also important arenas to deal with delegation
perils in multiparty governments (Carroll & Cox, 2012; Kim & Loewenberg,
2005). In most European legislatures, there are powerful and well-developed
committee systems, with extensive powers in shaping legislative production
(Mattson & Strøm, 1995). Consequently, coalition partners are expected to
“rely on members of their legislative faction to investigate the anticipated
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7
consequences of a bill, the justifications offered by the drafting ministers, and
available alternative policies” (Martin & Vanberg, 2004, p. 17).
Finally, coalition partners can also rely on collegial intraexecutive mechanisms for mutual control. Typically, they can use cabinet committee meetings, where coalition partners’ representatives meet to exchange information
and take decisions on behalf of the government (Mackie & Hogwood, 1985a).
Their advantage is that not only do they help minimize the workload of cabinet meetings, but they also help reduce transaction costs because of their
limited membership (Verba, 1961). Cabinet meetings are also a collective
veto player, where coalition partners can thwart the approval of bills that are
not optimal to all parties (Tsebelis, 1995; Tsebelis & Ha, 2014).
Wary Partners as Coalition Governance Devices
In this article, we propose an approach to coalition governance whereby political parties make a strategic use of portfolio allocation to create an institutional
constellation that helps them in their mutual oversight activities. Established
models of coalition formation posit that in successive bargaining rounds, parties seek to maximize their classic office and policy goals (Strøm, 1990).
Parties are concerned with obtaining not only the highest possible number of
portfolios but also the intrinsically more valuable ones, for example, the
Premiership or the Finance Minister (Warwick & Druckman, 2006). In addition, parties want to control portfolios that help them shape public policy in
issues that are particularly salient to them (Bäck, Debus, & Dumont, 2011).
Our argument is that in coalition governments, parties are willing to partially forgo their office- and policy-seeking considerations to maximize their
coalition governance capacities. Instead of having a bargaining process
informed exclusively by their desire to control more office positions, particularly prestigious portfolios with greater policy influence, parties also consider potential delegation perils. For that purpose, parties create an optimal
distribution of portfolios whereby they can make use of overlapping jurisdictions in neighboring portfolios to maximize their ability to keep tabs (Dewan
& Hortala-Vallve, 2011). By and large, such optimal distribution is achieved
when portfolios with overlapping jurisdictions are assigned ministers from
different parties. We call such institutional constellation wary partners.
Looking at the German case, Saalfeld (2000) explained how and why parties use strategic ministerial allocation for coalition governance purposes:
Cooperation and coordination between such “neighboring” ministries is usually
close and involves early and regular mutual information and consultation.
Legislative proposals are frequently sponsored by two or more such departments
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Comparative Political Studies 
with one in charge of the overall coordination process. If ministries controlled
by both coalition partners are involved in the drafting process, both parties gain
early, low-cost information on the “other-side’s” compliance with the letter and
the spirit of the coalition agreement. (Saalfeld, 2000, p. 70)
Literature on cabinets and ministers (Laver & Shepsle, 1994; Müller &
Strøm, 2000) provides extensive anecdotal evidence illustrating why there are
institutional conditions that make wary partners an optimal coalition governance
device. For example, Andeweg and Timmermans (2008) demonstrate that in the
Netherlands, important bills are generally drafted by several ministers. In return,
this opens the possibility for ministers to keep tabs on each other by making sure
that a fellow minister is following the coalition’s median preferences. In Ireland,
literature acknowledges that “the scope for independent ministerial incentives is
also severely restricted by the demands of interdepartmental coordination.
Ministers do not operate in a vacuum; new departures in one area quickly affect
others” (Farrell, 1994, p. 78). Similarly, in the Belgian case, the literature underlines constraints deriving from the “practical need for consultation and cooperation between ministers.” Consequently, “decisions do not fall clearly or
exclusively within the jurisdiction of one portfolio and, even if they formally do,
decisions may affect other portfolios to such an extent that consultation between
ministers becomes inevitable” (Timmermans, 1994, p. 115). Finally, in Finland,
where there are no junior ministers to use as an alternative coalition governance
mechanism, ministers “have their own jurisdictions within which they basically
operate independently of each other. However, they are of course able to watch
very carefully and to report the doings of their colleagues to the party and to the
coalition leadership” (Nousiainen, 2000, p. 283).
In organizational terms, wary partners can be equated with a committee of
two in the executive. Ministers of neighboring portfolios hold bilateral meetings in which they exchange information, signal their party’s preferences,
draft bills requiring contributions from both ministries, and follow up on previously implemented policies with implications for both jurisdictions (Mackie
& Hogwood, 1985b). Furthermore, in some circumstances, wary partners act
to ensure the preservation of the coalition’s median position. For illustrative
purposes, take the example in which a coalition agreement includes a policy
proposal closer to party A’s preferences, but which is to be implemented primarily by a minister from party B, who is reluctant to move the bill forward.
If there is a wary partner arrangement, party A has the capacity to refuse to
cosign all bills presented by party B until the latter complies with the coalition agreement and delivers the controversial proposal. These meetings help
ministers to curb information asymmetries by learning the doings of their
counterparts to, subsequently, communicate to their party leadership.
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In addition, wary partners can be deemed as a collective veto player, intervening ex-ante to the cabinet meeting. Recall that Tsebelis (2002) posits that
the latter are collective veto players where coalition partners can mutually
control each other. For a successful change in the status quo, all partners need
to acquiesce. The existence of wary partners’ arrangements creates an additional ex-ante veto player. Before a policy proposal reaches the cabinet meeting stage, or the cabinet committee for that matter, it needs to be bilaterally
approved in a committee of two. Ultimately, wary partners create a more
rationalized and efficient functioning of cabinet decision-making processes,
because parties obtain information, discuss, and agree at an earlier stage of
the legislative process.4
There are also plausible theoretical reasons suggesting that wary partners
might be a more efficient mechanism compared with junior ministers or committee systems (Müller & Meyer, 2010). First, as Thies (2001) recognizes,
junior ministers “do not share power with ministers, . . . do not vote in the
cabinet, and . . . only occasionally participate in cabinet meetings” (p. 587).
Junior ministers are hierarchically inferior to ministers, which can hinder
their capacity to extract information and report back to their party. Senior
ministers, thus, might be in a position to filter the information that reaches
their junior colleagues. By contrast, neighboring ministers are traditionally
more senior members of their political party, enjoying, at the same time, full
voting rights in cabinet meetings. Furthermore, a minister who chooses not to
cooperate with her neighboring ministry in the formulation of public policies
faces the risk of being defeated in a cabinet meeting. We assume that ministers anticipate this and choose to involve their neighboring colleagues to curb
the risk of potential disagreement in cabinet meetings.
Second, committee systems, irrespective of their institutional power, are
inherently exogenous and have only ex-post power. In parliamentary democracies, the legislature’s acquiescence is instrumental for the passage of bills.
Nevertheless, the executive, and ministers in particular, have the capacity to
draft proposals, which gives them significant power in defining the menu of
choices that will be presented to the cabinet and, later, to the parliament.
Committees intervene ex-post and can only make amendments to a drafted
proposal. In addition, not all committee systems are equally powerful. Many
legislatures, for example, the Belgian, often do little more than rubber stamp
governmental proposals (De Winter & Dumont, 2006).
Method and Data
To make an empirical appraisal of wary partners as coalition governance mechanisms in European parliamentary democracies, we use a mixed-method
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Comparative Political Studies 
approach. Recent advances in coalition research have underlined the advantages of unifying quantitative and qualitative evidence and techniques (Bäck &
Dumont, 2007). First, we make a quantitative approach, using a MC technique
to recreate portfolio allocation based on various assumptions about party
behavior. We then compare the results of the MC study with real-world evidence to observe whether they are different in a statistically meaningful way.
Second, we use interviews with ministers and top civil servants in four European
democracies that help us understand why and how political parties behave strategically in the allocation of portfolios for coalition governance purposes.
Combining quantitative and qualitative evidence helps us to have generalizable
findings and, at the same time, dwell on the micro-level causal mechanisms.
The quantitative study of our research questions poses important challenges chiefly because we cannot compare directly across governments.
First, the organizational structure of executives makes the potential number
of wary partners considerably different across space and time. Second, the
total number of available office payoffs also has significant variation across
governments. Third, executives have varying numbers of coalition partners
and often highly unbalanced internal distributions of power. To meet these
empirical challenges, we propose to standardize the observed number of
wary partners against a simulated number of wary partners in which parties
have only office and policy considerations.
To simulate the number of wary partners, we use a MC approach. This can
be conceived as a baseline model, assuming nonstrategic behavior, against
which a real-world distribution, assuming strategic behavior, will be compared. Our simulation hinges on three assumptions. First, coalition partners
have office and policy goals only. Coalition partners’ strategies in the bargaining process are purely driven by the expected utility derived from obtaining payoffs. Utility should increase linearly in proportion to the weight of the
portfolio in the executive. Second, they are nonstrategic in the allocation of
portfolios and do not assign different parties to neighboring portfolios.
Finally, our simulation procedure assumes that coalition bargaining is a black
box, whose content is not only unknown to us but also nondeterministic.
Consequently, our estimations are translated into a stochastic simulation,
whereby we build a ratio that can be considered as a random variable.
If the simulation were conducted only once, that would leave unnecessary
uncertainty regarding the true expected value of wary partners under nonstrategic allocation. Thus, we use MC techniques to simulate repeated rounds of
coalition bargaining until the average of those iterations converges toward the
expected number of wary partners under a nonstrategic allocation process.
The latter requires a more detailed explanation. From a statistical point of
view, we would ideally assign a hypothetical expected value of the number of
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Fernandes et al.
wary partners under nonstrategic assignment. However, the assignment process of ministers to coalition partners does not follow any known statistical
distribution. Consequently, it is not possible to produce a corresponding
probability mass function f(x). Ideally, we would derive the expected value of
a discrete random variable X using
E[X ] =
∑ xf ( x),
x∈D ( X )
with D(X) denoting the support of X. However, because the probability f(x)
for a given x is unknown in our case, we cannot retrieve the expected number
of wary partners per government, which we need to compare with the actually observed number of wary partners per government.
MC simulation methods allow us to artificially create R random draws
from the target distribution. It can be shown that for R → ∞
E[X ]
1
R
R
∑x
(r )
, x(r ) ∼ f
r =1
where x ( r ) is the simulated number of wary partners in simulation run r. Since
it is impossible to analytically derive the true expected value for the number of
wary partners under nonstrategic assignment, this simulation strategy still
allows us to estimate it in a statistically consistent way. Subsequently, this
estimator of the baseline model will be compared against the strategic model.
To compare the nonstrategic against the strategic model, we create a ratio,
that is, a composite variable at the individual government level, consisting of
the actual number of wary partners observed in the real-world divided by the
MC estimator for the expected number of wary partners under nonstrategic
allocation. If there were no strategic behavior, the ratio would be centered
around 1 and deviations at the government level would be purely random.
Conversely, our wary partners argument will be empirically supported if the
ratio is >1.
While the ratio itself is unlikely to be normally distributed, the sample
mean over all ratios (resulting from R = 1,000) is expected to follow a normal
distribution according to the Central Limit Theorem. Thus, we use a t test to
test the wary partners’ argument. In addition, we make a Bayesian multilevel
model to account for the clustered data structure, which allows us to investigate country-specific effects.
Following the quantitative analysis, we move to investigate the micro-foundations of wary partners. Specifically, we are interested in understanding how
and why political actors choose to use this coalition governance mechanism. To
enhance our understanding of the causal mechanisms of wary
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Comparative Political Studies 
partners’ arrangements, we use interviews with ministerial elites and, also, top
civil servants. In the last section of the article, we examine results of interviews
with 44 former ministers in Belgium (10), Germany (14), Italy (14), and the
Netherlands (10).5 Those countries are typically the cases with recurring coalition governments, which provide ministers with cumulative knowledge of how
efficiently coalition governance mechanisms operate (Müller & Strøm, 2000).
To construct our data set, we have retrieved data from a variety of sources.
We have used the European Representative Democracy Data Archive
(Andersson, Bergman, & Ersson, 2014) for a detailed composition of coalition governments. Further details have been provided from individual country chapters in Müller and Strøm (2000), as well as the recent WHO Governs
Europe data set (Casal Bértoa, 2015). In addition, we have used yearbook
reports and the Keesing’s World News Archive. Information on portfolio
salience to construct a transitivity ranking that informs parties in coalition
bargaining has been derived from Druckman and Warwick (2005). Our data
set includes Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy,
Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and Sweden for a total of
261 governments from 1945 until 2011.6
Our analysis of wary partners is restricted to three different constellations: (a)
Finance and Economy, (b) Foreign Affairs and Defense, (c) and Justice and
Interior.7 We have chosen to confine our analysis to those six portfolios in three
potential wary partners for several reasons. First, they are arguably the most
important portfolios for any coalition, making them valuable prizes for all political parties. Second, and precisely because of their importance, these portfolios
exist across all European parliamentary democracies. Even if they nominally
have slightly different variations in name, their functional equivalents are easily
matched. Third, with few exceptions, these portfolios have existed in European
parliamentary democracies since 1945. These are policy areas that are stable
over space and time, facilitating cross-sectional analysis.8 Finally, our choice of
ministries has also been informed by the results of our interviews. Our interviewees have systematically cited these specific jurisdictions and combinations
as typical examples of what we came to term as wary partners’ behavior.9
Analysis
Estimating the Number of Wary Partners Under Nonstrategic
Assignment
We let Ci denote the cabinet size of government i with i = 1, , n , and K i
the corresponding number of coalition partners. Because portfolios are not
T
considered to be equally important, we let w i = [ wi ,1 , , wi ,C ] denote the
i
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Fernandes et al.
assigned weights to each of these portfolios in descending order, where w1,i
denotes the weight for the prime minister, which is the most valuable portfolio in all coalitions.
Research on portfolio allocation has extensively demonstrated that there
is an almost-perfect linear relationship between the percentage of seats with
which a party contributes to the coalition majority and the percentage of
portfolios in cabinet (Browne & Franklin, 1973; Gamson, 1961; Warwick &
Druckman, 2006). The party bargaining power within government i describes
the relative percentage of votes among the K i coalition partners, that is, the
number of votes for a party divided by the sum of the votes of all coalition
T
partners, and is denoted by p i = [ pi ,1 , , pi , K ] . The only almost-perfect
i
relationship can be attributed to stochastic elements, and the varying relative
importance of portfolios reflected in w i. Each coalition partner is assigned a
bargaining power proportional to their number of seats, and the vector
g i = [ gi ,1 , , gi , K ]T containing the party-specific bargaining power is
i
derived by
gi =
Σ
pi
C
i w
j =1 i , j
. (1)
We assume that the assignment of portfolios to coalition partners has two
deterministic rules:
1. The coalition partner with the largest bargaining power invariably
gets the premiership (Glasgow, Golder, & Golder, 2011).
2. Each coalition partner obtains at least one portfolio, irrespective of its
bargaining power (Browne & Franklin, 1973).10
Our simulation algorithm can be equated with a take turns approach.11
After the Premiership is assigned to the party with the largest bargaining
power, its bargaining capacity is reduced by the “cost” (i.e., the weight wi,1 )
of the prime minister portfolio. Subsequently, the second most prestigious
portfolio wi,2 is assigned to a coalition partner according to a weighted random draw, where the weights consist of g i , with the first element gi,1 now
being reduced by wi,1 .
This procedure is repeated for all remaining portfolios, with the bargaining power for the party that has been assigned a portfolio in the previous
round being reduced by the corresponding weight of that portfolio. Once a
party exhausts all its bargaining power, it can no longer obtain any further
portfolios. The assignment algorithm stops if either all portfolios are assigned,
or if the number of parties without a single portfolio has become as big as the
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Comparative Political Studies 
number of remaining portfolios. If the latter holds for one coalition partner,
the remaining portfolio is automatically assigned to this party. In the unlikely
event that more than one coalition partner has not managed to secure a single
portfolio, the algorithm described above is applied with all coalition partners
excluded which already have at least one portfolio.
Finally, the distribution of portfolios among coalition partners is examined
with respect to all potential wary partners situations within government i, and
the number of wary partners situations hi* is denoted.
MC Simulation
Due to the nondeterministic nature of coalition bargaining, the repeated allocation process yields potentially different portfolio allocations. To obtain an
approximately unbiased estimator of the true number of wary partners to be
expected per government, the allocation process is repeated R = 1,000 times.
The average number of all R iterations is the MC estimator for this expected
value and is given by
R
µiMC= 1 h* , (2)
i,r
R r =1
Σ
where hi*, r denotes the number of simulated wary partners of government i in
iteration r. Because all weights have not been observed in some countries,
each MC cycle uses hot deck imputations for missing weights.12 Thus, it
implicitly assumes that these weights are missing completely at random
(Little & Rubin, 2002).13 Additional uncertainty induced by the missing data
is not corrected (e.g., by using multiple imputation), because the goal of the
MC simulation is to create an estimator of the expected value of wary partners, whose variance is extremely small thanks to the high number of
iterations.
Recall that the number of wary partners does not allow a comparison
between governments. First, not all governments have the same portfolio
structure, leading to different numbers of potential wary partners. Second,
the number of coalition members, and their party power, influences the
probability of using such arrangements. All these factors are now accounted
for by µ̂MC
i . This allows us to construct a ratio of the actual number of wary
partners, assuming that parties behave strategically, and compare it with its
estimated expectational nonstrategic counterpart. In doing so, we are not
only able to interpret differences across governments but also assess whether
our observed data support the wary partners’ theory in general. We let this
ratio be denoted by
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Fernandes et al.
δi =
hi
µiMC
, (3)
where hi is the actually observed number of wary partners for government i.
If δ > 1 , this means that the government has more observed wary partners
situations than would have been expected under nonstrategic assignment.
Results of the MC Simulation
In what follows, we investigate the empirical distribution of the ratio δ
described in Equation (3). Figure 1 illustrates the distribution of this ratio.
Recall that under nonstrategic assignment, the ratio is expected to oscillate
around 1, as seen in the dotted vertical line, with some governments having
more wary partners, and others experiencing fewer. Our empirical results
indicate that the distribution in Figure 1 centers around a value larger than 1.
The long-dashed line indicates that, on average, when parties incorporate
office, policy, and coalition governance considerations in their coalition bargaining, they choose to use wary partners constellations. Overall, this provides a first piece of empirical evidence for our theoretical expectations.
To assess whether nonstrategic assignment could still be possible considering our real-world data, we perform a one-sided t test that helps to appraise
whether or not the observed mean of 1.176 is significantly greater than one
( H 0 : δ ≤ 1 ). Since the observational units are not independent, we correct
the sample size using the variance inflation factor VIF = 1 + ρicc (m − 1) ,
where m describes the average number of governments per country, and
ρicc is the intraclass correlation coefficient. The resulting p value of .0729
suggests that there is some support for the hypothesis that there is a strategic
portfolios allocation. However, the Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) of 6.13
suggests that we need to account for country-variation in the use of such
mechanisms.
We account for country-specific clustering effects and error terms by
assuming a multilevel structure for the data, where country j ( j = 1, , J )
contains n j observations at the individual government level, and i is used as
the iterator within a country. This means that the distribution of δ ij , that is,
the ratio of government i in country j, is governed by a country-specific mean
θ j and a group-homogeneous variance σ 2 . Country-specific means are, in
turn, governed by a global mean µ and variance τ 2. Figure 2 confirms that
country-specific effects in ratio δ are meaningful.
The distribution of δ by country is displayed using boxplots, whose
width is proportional to n j , and jittered observations. In addition, the
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Comparative Political Studies 
Figure 1. Distribution of the artificially created ratio variable δ .
countries are ranked by δ j , which is also added to the box plot as a white
triangle symbol. Recall that countries where δ j > 1 have more wary partners
arrangements than would be expected under a nonstrategic allocation.
Figure 2 suggests that there are five countries where political parties do not
systematically behave strategically to create wary partners arrangements in
coalition bargaining.14 In Ireland, Norway, Austria, Luxembourg, and Finland,
the observed distribution of portfolios is below what one would expect under
nonstrategic assignment. Conversely, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal,
Denmark, and Germany are the countries where strategic usage of portfolio
assignment for coalition governance purposes is most prevailing. Germany is
a particularly interesting case, with about twice as many wary partners as
would be expected under nonstrategic behavior, which bodes well with existing anecdotal evidence (Saalfeld, 2000). Overall, these results seem to suggest
that wary partners are more used in some countries than in others.
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Fernandes et al.
Figure 2. Distribution of δ conditioned on country and ranked by averages.
While the pooled distribution of δ displayed in Figure 1 suggested a
slightly skewed distribution, it is challenging to find a statistically ideal
solution to account for government-level variation, as some countries
have peaks for δ ij = 0 , which makes the distribution semicontinuous for
some but not for all of them. Because sample sizes are small, and no
other distribution offers a clear advantage, we apply the normal model at
both the country and the government levels (Hoff, 2009). We assume that
individual observations (governments) within groups (countries) are
independent, which is not ensured, but could not be remedied whether
untrue.
The Bayesian two-level normal model can be denoted as
δ | θ j , σ2  N (θ j , σ2 ) (4)
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Comparative Political Studies 
θ j | µ, τ2  N ( µ, τ2 ), (5)
and the corresponding semiconjugate prior distributions are specified as
1
 G (ν 0 / 2, ν 0σ 02 / 2) (6)
σ2
1
 G (η0 / 2, η0 τ02 / 2) (7)
τ2
µ  N (µ 0 , γ 02 ). (8)
Here, the hyperparameters ν 0 and η0 reflect the virtual sample size of the
prior distributions for σ2 and τ2, and are both set to 1 to keep the prior information as vague as possible. The corresponding scale parameters σ02 and τ02
were both set to 10. Finally, the hyperparameter for the prior of the population mean µ0 was set to 1, and the corresponding variance was set to 4.15
We apply a Gibbs sampler with 5,000 iterations.16 Results for the posterior
averages based on the remaining 4,000 MC simulations of θ j | δ , µ ,τ are
displayed in Figure 3.
The circles represent the posterior means of the θ j s while the vertical lines
denote two standard deviations. The size of the circles are proportional to the corresponding sample size n j. The gray solid line marks equality of sample and
posterior means and posterior. All posterior means are slightly dragged toward
the posterior mean of the population. This is referred to as the “shrinkage” effect,
which in this analysis is virtually nonexistent. Finally, the nonstrategic threshold
is added again as a dashed line, which helps to demonstrate, again, that, in some
countries, parties show more strategic behavior in the allocation of portfolios.
While Norway at the bottom left is slightly pulled toward the population
mean µ, the posterior mean for Germany at the other end is almost identical
to the sample mean δ j , because of Germany’s larger subsample size n j. In
general, the multilevel analysis has not changed the order of the ranking,
because many countries have values close to the population mean µ, where
the shrinkage hardly affects the results.
Overall, our empirical results suggest that political parties behave strategically in coalition bargaining. In addition to their traditional office and policy
goals, parties are concerned in forming wary partners’ constellations to help
them in their oversight. This behavior happens more frequently in some
countries than in others. In the next section, we explore some of causal mechanisms behind wary partners by looking at evidence from interviews with
ministers and civil servants.
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Fernandes et al.
19
Figure 3. Shrinkage effect for δ .
How Ministers Perceive Coalition Governance
As discussed in previous sections, political parties are willing to forgo some
of their office and policy goals to maximize their coalition governance mechanisms. In what follows, we focus on some of the causal mechanisms behind
this behavior. How and why do parties choose to strategically place their
agents in neighboring portfolios? This section is based on interviews with
former ministers and top civil servants in four European parliamentary
democracies, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.
We start our foray into the perceptions that ministers have on coalition
governance mechanisms by asking whether, and if yes how, they are informed
about their colleagues’ actions. Thirty-eight out of forty-four (86% of the
interviewees) refer spontaneously to the usage of wary partners as an efficient mechanism to curb ministerial informational asymmetries.17 A German
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Comparative Political Studies 
minister, for example, reports that in, “most of the relevant cases the legislation is prepared by two ministers. . . . We have what we call ‘twin ministries,’
they are both involved in similar matters.” To be sure, “in a coalition government, it is normally the case that twin ministries are in the hands of two different parties.” A Dutch minister reiterates this idea, equating wary partners
as a committee of two “ministers are defined so that competences are crossed.
At the end of the day, each party is represented in a sub-committee.”18
In addition to curb information asymmetries, wary partners are also perceived as useful mechanisms to amend or block a colleague’s initiative. Fiftytwo percent of our interviewees recognize the utility of wary partners for
those actions.19 A former Belgian minister says that “ministers with related
portfolios are often from different parties. A party will use the competences
of one of its ministers to block another party’s measures . . . to have leverage
on the other’s competences.” Typically, in Italy, ministers view wary partners
as an institutionalized committee of two where they can exchange mutual
benefits. According to a former minister “when a neighboring minister is
interested in what I do, we do an exchange. Those exchanges are on the table,
not under the table.”
When asked to provide a more detailed explanation of how this mechanism works, interviewees confirmed our assumption, based on anecdotal evidence available in the literature, that the agreement of several ministries is a
necessary condition before important legislative pieces are referred to the
cabinet. Consequently, the need for interdepartmental cooperation opens the
door to keeping tabs activities. In light of what we learned from our sample
of interviewees, a minister would not have a chance of approving, or even
discussing, her proposals in cabinet meetings without the previous coordination and agreement of colleagues in neighboring areas. In the Netherlands,
for example, this collaboration even has a formal statute as many decisions
are conducted in the so-called “sub-cabinet committee.” In other countries,
the process is more informal, but ministers recognize that they should inform
ministers in neighboring areas when working on an important proposal.
By and large, the utility of wary partners for coalition governance hinges
on their capacity to rationalize decision making. According to a former Dutch
Prime Minister, “a minister can prepare an initiative on its own, but it will
need the agreement of neighboring ministers at the end. He has an interest to
work in a collegial way.” “In Italy, all governmental measures should be
coordinated by neighboring ministers, otherwise when the measures arrive in
the Council the latter will say no.”
Interdepartmental bargaining is complex. For example, in Germany, a top
civil servant explains that, “when we have two ministers involved, interministerial talks start when experts from the ministries meet to discuss measures,
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21
to agree on concrete articles of legislation and, as long as they agree, everything is fine.” However, as the same civil servant admits, “if there is a disagreement, the matter escalates after a while, which means that the next level
of ministerial responsibility is involved.” Specifically, the institutional ladder
follows the ministerial hierarchy: “The first stage is the senior public servant
in the ministry, the heads of units of the two ministries concerned, then the
level of the director general, then the permanent secretaries, then the two
ministers.” Ultimately, “if no solution can be found, the next step is to refer it
to the coalition committee.”
Our interviews shed some light on how important wary partners are vis-àvis other coalition governance mechanisms. Regarding the usage of parliamentary committees, results are mixed. Albeit referred to for Germany, Italy,
and the Netherlands, those mechanisms have not been mentioned for the
Belgian case. In the latter, the weakness of the committee system makes it an
ineffective arena (Martin & Vanberg, 2011). Thus, parties may choose to rely
on other mechanisms to shadow coalition partners and curb uncertainty in
policy outcomes.
The cabinet and its preparatory meetings are reported frequently in our
interviews as keeping tabs mechanisms, which goes against the argument that
cabinets are not efficient in providing “routine check-in mechanisms” (Martin
& Vanberg, 2011, p. 33). Particularly, ministers’ representatives meet once a
week to prepare the council of ministers and, according to our interviewees,
to exchange information to thwart conflict and gridlock in the cabinet meeting.20 Traditionally, a significant number of preparatory meetings between
junior cabinet members or civil servants precedes formal cabinet meetings.
Our understanding is that collective cabinet meetings and wary partners are
particularly complementary, to the extent that ministers in neighboring areas
share a mutual interest in avoiding a veto to their proposals at the cabinet
level. The existence of a committee of two helps parties to minimize the
chances that the cabinet exerts its veto capacity.
Interestingly, none of the 68 interviewees spontaneously refer to junior
ministers as an efficient mechanism of information acquisition or mutual
veto. When specifically asked about the role of junior ministers, interviewees
recognize that, albeit they are at points crucial in ensuring the passage of a
bill through parliament, they do not have a strong enough role in the cabinet
organization as to limit ministerial autonomy. Rather, junior ministers are
positions that help expand the scope of available office payoffs to be distributed, facilitating rounding and accommodating particular requests for policy
areas.21 As a former Belgian prime minister explained, “junior ministers exist
to solve ‘accountancy’ problems of ministerial office repartition, certainly
not to get information about what the minister is preparing.”
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Comparative Political Studies 
Civil servants in ministries have a stealth relation with junior ministers,
particularly regarding information diffusion. A former secretary of state
from Germany notes that, “if a junior minister asks ‘I know you are working on something, give me the proposal,’ he will put people in the units in
difficulty, they will not know what to do. They would probably check with
the minister whether they can report or not.” By and large, ministers filter
the information available to junior ministers, who recognize that the extent
to which they are informed is contingent on the ministers’ discretion.
According to a German junior minister, “[they] are not there to monitor
what their ministers are doing, it is absolutely nonsense because it is not
possible.” The same minister acknowledges that, “it is up to the minister to
give information or not to his junior.” In a similar vein, a former Italian
junior minister recognizes his frustration at his lack of information and
power, “[in my previous job] I used to be informed of everything and to
take decisions and, paradoxically, in the government, I no longer had this
responsibility. Of course I knew what was happening in the ministry, but it
was only because the minister forwarded me his emails . . . it was a bit
depressing, actually.”
Conclusion
In this article, we explored whether political parties are willing to partially
relinquish the pursuit of office and policy goals to maximize their coalition
governance capacities. We were motivated by the disjuncture between the
existing anecdotal evidence in the literature on ministers and cabinets and the
lack of comparative studies with generalizable findings. The former has consistently pointed out that jurisdictional overlap forces ministers to share
information, to cooperate in drafting and implementing policy payoffs, and in
following up previously implemented policies. In return, jurisdictional overlap offers parties the possibility of mutual oversight.
Our argument revolved around political parties creating wary partners
arrangements by allocating ministers of different parties to neighboring
ministries. Ministers act as party agents, reporting to the party leadership
about the activities in that particular jurisdiction, and helping parties to
ensure they receive previously agreed policy payoffs. Consequently, a
conception of parties as office- and policy-seeking institutions that sometimes have to make hard choices and forgo an important portfolio to obtain
a portfolio that will help them keep tabs on their partners seems more
realistic.
Our mixed-method approach conjugated a MC simulation with qualitative evidence from over forty former ministers and top civil servants from
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23
Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. First, we recreated a counterfactual distribution of portfolios based on a baseline model in which parties
have only office and policy goals (Strøm, 1990). That simulation assumes
that proportionality is the rule for portfolio allocation and that portfolio
salience plays a role in determining parties’ behavior (Browne & Franklin,
1973; Druckman & Warwick, 2005). Second, we used interviews to help us
understand the causal mechanisms of this overlooked coalition governance
mechanism. We explored how and why political parties perceive wary
partners.
Our contribution helps us rethink the role of portfolios as coalition governance mechanisms in European parliamentary democracies. First, the
comparison of the results of the MC estimator of simulated nonstrategic
assignment and the real-world assignment suggest that the latter have significantly more wary partners than would be expected if parties were only
office and policy seekers. By and large, the number of wary partners in
parliamentary democracies would be lower if some sort of proportionality
rule, conjugated with salience, were the sole determinants of portfolio
allocation. We find that parties behave strategically and include coalition
governance considerations in the negotiation of office and policy spoils.
Parties are willing to forgo a more important portfolio for a portfolio that
helps them maximize their oversight capacities. Our findings are robust to
cross-sectional and cross-time variation. To be sure, there is some crosscountry variation in the extent to which parties use this mechanism. In
some countries, wary partners are widely used. In others, they are used
more parsimoniously.
Second, our contribution sheds light on how and why parties choose to
rely on such arrangements for coalition governance purposes. From our
interviews, we learn that ministers equate wary partners as committees of
two that help rationalize the decision-making process in the executive. To
be sure, having an arena where coalition parties are represented and can
exchange information, signal their party’s position, and follow up on policies helps reduce transaction costs. In addition, wary partners are institutionalized mechanisms to exchange benefits and enforce coalition partners
to deliver.
This article constitutes a first foray into the comparative examination of
wary partners. Future contributions should look into institutional-based
explanations for government- and country-level variation in the use of wary
partners. Moreover, future research needs to reconsider an integrated model
of coalition governance to test the competitive usage mechanisms that have
hitherto been examined in isolation, to understand why and how some coalitions choose some mechanisms over others.
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Comparative Political Studies 
Appendix
A Pseudo Algorithm for the Assignment Process Under
Nonstrategic Allocation
This appendix contains the pseudo algorithm used in the assignment process
under nonstrategic allocation. Here, cabinet (i ) is a vector describing the cabinet of government i, whose elements eventually contain the party identifier
ranging from 1 to K i for each of the Ci elements. Parentheses for iterators
indicate nonatomic elements, whereas squared brackets pertain to atomic elements. The following pseudo algorithm describes the essential part of assigning parties to portfolios and does not include the imputation process nor the
break-off exceptions described below. For the MC estimator, an additional
loop is needed, which is likewise not part of the assignment method as such.
Algorithm 1 Assignment under nonstrategic allocation
1: procedure ALLOCATION ALGORITHM
2: for i from 1 to n do
3: cabinet(i)[1] = 1 prime minister for biggest coalition partner
4: g(i)[1] = g(i)[1] – w(i)[1] # subtract weight of PM from biggest party’s
bargaining power
5: for j from 2 to C ( i ) do
6: sample k ∈ {1,  , Ki } with weights g( i ) # Who gets portfolio j ?
7: cabinet(i)[j] = k
8: g(i)[k] = max ((g(i)[k] – w(i)[j]), 0) # Reduce each party’s bargaining power
after the cost of obtaining a new portfolio in each round of allocation.
Cost is calculated according to the portfolio’s weight (salience).
9: end for
10: Determine number of wary partners for government i
11: end for
12: end procedure
Note. PM = Prime-Minister.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Thomas Saalfeld, Cícero Roberto Pereira, and Florian
Herold for several inspiring conversations and suggestions. We are grateful to
Fernando Casal Bértoa for sharing his WHO Governs data set with us. Helpful comments and suggestions from the editors and three anonymous reviewers are gratefully
acknowledged. All remaining errors and omissions remain our sole responsibility.
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Fernandes et al.
25
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1. Saalfeld (2000) presents anecdotal evidence for the German case illustrating how
parties make use of such mechanism in that country.
2. For extensive anecdotal evidence on this particular point, please see the country
chapters in Laver and Shepsle (1994) and Müller and Strøm (2000).
3. We should note, however, that political parties are not homogeneous units, in
which their members sharing a full set of preferences. In most cases, party members share a core set of preferences and have different views on other topics
(Meyer, 2012).
4. This arrangement, however, raises the risk of collusion if the two ministers choose
to drift from their parties’ positions to maximize their mutual utility. Literature
found mixed evidence on this issue. Dewan and Hortala-Vallve (2011) argue
that it remains an open question whether ministers are able to forge an agreement that avoids unilateral deviations. Differently, Alexiadou (2015) posits that
“individual ministers’ agency” matters “even in highly institutionalized political
environments, such as in European parliamentary democracies” (p. 1076).
5. Interviews were held by the third author during the period September 2010-June
2012. Interviewees were promised anonymity and asked open questions to which
their answers were recorded verbatim. Interviewees were given plenty of leeway to
mention their role as ministers and coalition members, as the interviewer refrained
from suggesting any particular answers. The answers to questions that were used
in this article were as follows: (a) “Do you feel informed about the initiatives of
colleagues from other parties?”; Because the answer was in all cases yes, we then
asked (b) “How do you get to know about these initiatives?”; (c) “Imagine that a
colleague is preparing something that you disagree with, do you have any ways
to stop or amend the initiative?” As the answer was systematically yes, we subsequently asked, (d) “Can you tell me how you would do that?” Finally, (e) “Imagine
that a minister is not implementing a part of the coalition agreement that is salient
to your party, do you have any ways to force him to act (when the answer was ‘yes,’
we ask): How so?” In a final step, we categorized every mechanism spontaneously
referred to by interviewees and counted how many of those mentioned the allocation of neighboring ministers to different coalition parties.
6. For a complete list of country-governments analyzed here, as well as the number
of potential and observed wary partners, please refer to the online appendix.
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Comparative Political Studies 
7. We do not claim that these are the only possible jurisdictions. Depending on
country- and government-specific factors, such as ideology or past coalition
experiences, parties might find that other jurisdictions need such arrangement.
8. For example, for most of the 1940s and 1950s, there were several countries
(e.g., Austria, Belgium, and Germany) with several portfolios devoted to reconstruction or war rebuilding. Conversely, the 1990s and 2000s witnessed the
emergency of ministries dealing with Environment or European Affairs. These
examples illustrate the difficulty of finding cross-sectional and cross-time functional equivalents.
9. For example, a German minister says that, “Home Affairs [Interior] and Justice are
‘twin ministries.’ Home Affairs deals . . . with the angle of counterterrorism and
homeland security, and Justice . . . deals with . . . the angel of respect for fundamental rights and constitutional guarantees.” A Belgian Minister reiterates that “We also
avoid that Finance or Budget . . . to be in the same party or same linguistic group.”
A Dutch Minister says that “there are several ministries which have the co-decision
making position, for example, Foreign ministry and Minister of Defense.”
10. Accordingly, this assumption accounts for the slight overcompensation to small
parties.
11. The pseudo algorithm can be found in the appendix.
12. There are some residual cases for which Druckman and Warwick (2005) do not
provide values.
13. Hot deck imputation describes a resampling technique, where missing values
are imputed by drawing with replacement from the subsample of the observed
values. The name stems from times when data was stored using punch cards, and
the term “hot deck” was used to distinguish the method from imputing data using
external information, which was referred to as “cold deck” imputation.
14. This might result from the fact that, under the multilevel model approach, purely
descriptive rankings ignore that countries with few observations are more likely
to be ranked at either side of the two extremes, because the variance of the averages depends on nj, which means that averages based on a few governments can
take extreme values just by chance more often than averages based on a larger
sample. Norway is a typical example of this situation in that there are only 10
coalition governments since 1945.
15. In practice, this means that we hold no a priori expectation that parties will
behave strategically.
16. The burn-in was set to 1,000, although diagnostics suggest that a much lower
value would have sufficed.
17. Wary partners—or some sort of functional equivalent—were refereed spontaneously by 60% of interviews in Belgium, 70% in the Netherlands, and 100% in
Germany and in Italy.
18. Cabinet committee brings together the ministers of neighboring areas. It is
chaired by the prime minister and always includes the minister of finance and
one vice prime minister.
19. The detail results are as follows: 100% in Italy, 21% in Belgium, 57% in the
Netherlands, and 81% in Germany.
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20. Their official names are as follows: Chiefs of Staff in Belgium, Chiefs of the
Legislative Office in Italy, Administrative Secretaries of State in Germany, and
Director Generals in the Netherlands.
21. Junior ministers offer the possibility for parties to signal to their electorate the
importance of a particular policy area while not being too difficult to obtain in
coalition bargaining. Their distribution is a way to create win-win situations, in
which several parties can claim ownership of the same issue.
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Author Biographies
Jorge M. Fernandes is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Bamberg,
Germany, working for the `PATHWAYS’ project. Fernandes holds a PhD in Political
and Social Sciences from the European University Institute, Florence. His research
interests are comparative political institutions, legislatures, coalitions, and political
parties. His work has been published in European Journal of Political Research, West
European Politics, Government and Opposition, and Journal of Legislative Studies.
Florian Meinfelder is a senior lecturer at the department of Statistics and Econometrics
at the University of Bamberg, Germany. His research interests comprise statistical
analysis of incomplete data, Bayesian inference, and statistical programming.
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Catherine Moury is an assistant professor at the FCSH-NOVA University of Lisbon.
Her research focuses on institutional change in the European Union and on comparative policy-making, about which she has published in journals such as European
Journal of Public Policy, West European Politics and Party Politics. She is the author
of ‘Coalition Government and Party Mandate: How coalition agreements constrain
ministerial action’ (Routledge, 2013) and ‘Changing rules of delegation: A contest of
Power for comitology’ (with A. Héritier, C. Bisschoff e C-F. Bergström, Oxford
University Press, 2013).
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