The design of government portfolios – that is, the distribution of competencies among government ministries and office holders – has been largely ignored in the study of executive and coalition politics. This article argues that portfolio design is a substantively and theoretically relevant phenomenon that has major implications for the study of institutional design and coalition politics. The authors use comparative data on portfolio design reforms in nine Western European countries since the 1970s to demonstrate how the design of government portfolios changes over time. Specifically, they show that portfolios are changed frequently (on average about once a year) and that such shifts are more likely after changes in the prime ministership or the party composition of the government. These findings suggest a political logic behind these reforms based on the preferences and power of political parties and politicians. They have major implications for the study of institutional design and coalition politics.

International audienc

Empirical assessments of issue competition suffer from a fuzzy conception of what a "policy issue" is, but also from the scarcity of studies integrating both salience and positional perspectives. This article tries to provide a more precise definition of a "policy issue" and proposes a typology of electoral issues that takes into account the two sides of issue politicization-the decision whether to address an issue, and the decision to take a diverging or similar position on it. This typology allows distinguishing between proprietal, consensual and conflictual issues. This framework is applied to the example the politicization of EUrelated issues by British, French and German parties. Issue ownership, considered from the parties' perspective, appears to be both exceptional and ephemeral, with a decline of proprietal issues over time, which is reflected in parties' tendency to devote attention to the same issues than their competitors. Furthermore, regarding EU-related issues, we observe a primacy of consensus, especially amongst governing parties. « The question whether a given problem poses a position-or valence-issue is a matter to be settled empirically and not on a priori logical grounds. » (Stokes, 1963, p.373

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