The article focuses on the differences in pledge fulfilment strategies in majority and substantive minority governments. Issue ownership and dynamic agenda-setting literature are applied, expecting that government parties will focus on fulfilling the party’s most salient pledges, and also the pledges that are publicly salient for the whole electorate. Adding these expectations to the context of substantive minority governments, parties must accommodate these attempts because they face the opposition actor(s) with veto power and their own policy motivation. Compared to majority governments, the odds of adopting party-salient pledges should decrease for minority coalition parties. The effect of public-salient issues should also differ from the majority governments. This analysis is conducted on government party pledges in one minority and two majority governments in the Czech Republic (formed after 2006, 2010, and 2013 elections). The analysis shows a generally weak effect for party and public issue salience on pledge fulfilment. The decreasing effect of party issue salience for minority government parties is supported; the effect of public issue salience does, however, not differ in its decreasing direction from the majority governments. The additional model including combinations of the high and low party and public salience shows that for minority governments, public salience decreases the odds of fulfilment regardless of party issue salience. The article concludes with a contextual explanation of the minority government’s special character in the Czech case.
Translating party pledges into coalition agreements is a crucial goal of after-election coalition negotiations. Full adoption is the best result for the bargaining party, while limited adoption is a kind of compromise forced by coalition partners, and non-adoption can be seen as a defeat. The question of what undermines the compromise and defeat in coalition agreements is, however, rarely answered. This article formulates hypotheses concerning the effect of consensual pledges among coalition parties, and party and voter-issue salience on parties’ ability to adopt their pledges and adopt them fully or partially. The effect of party level characteristics is considered. The analysis is provided on a new dataset of narrow Czech coalition party pledges in three governments established after elections in 2006, 2010 and 2013. Multinomial logit regression is used for the statistical analysis.
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