Ministerial Government and Reform Productivity in Parliamentary Democracies
- Author(s)
- Hanna Bäck, Wolfgang C. Müller, Mariyana Angelova, Daniel Strobl
- Abstract
Can ministers in parliamentary democracies influence reform policy? This paper investigates the role of ministerial prerogatives for policy output. In parliamentary democracies, ministerial posts give coalition partners policy discretion, which they can use to shape government policy in their allocated ministries. To evaluate the impact of ministers in coalition policy-making, we start from the general proposition that governing parties will introduce more reforms when the policy status quo is located further away from their ideological position. We thus hypothesize that an increased distance between the party position of a minister and the policy status quo leads to higher reform productivity in the policy area controlled by the ministry. We also hypothesize that this effect is conditional on the institutional setting, and suggest that ministerial influence is weaker when parliaments that have strong oversight mechanisms. We evaluate our hypotheses using a new data set of important socio-economic reform measures introduced in 11 Western European countries between 1985 and 2005, based on a coding of country reports issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Our results reveal that ministers have an impact on reform-making, but mainly when legislative institutions are weak.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Lund University
- Pages
- 1
- No. of pages
- 36
- Publication date
- 2018
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/f1eaad26-d15b-45bc-a5fc-5f12961284b3