Topic Coverage of Coalition Agreements in Multi-Level Settings: The Case of Germany

Abstract

When analysing coalition agreements, scholars mostly concentrate on those agreements that are written at the national level. However, there is also a considerable amount of coalition agreements that are written at sub-national levels. This paper analyses the commonalities and differences in coalition agreements in the German multi-level system at the national, regional and local level. From a legal jurisdiction perspective, one would expect that there are major differences across political levels in the topics covered in the agreements. From a multi-level governance perspective, however, one would additionally expect that government parties also devote their attention to policy domains that lie outside their realm of legislative decision-making. We take Germany as a prime example for a political system characterized by joint decision-making authorities within cooperative federalism. Combining data from the Political Documents Archive (www.polidoc.net) with newly data from the Local Manifesto Project (LMP; www.localpartymanifestos.de), we analyse nearly 200 coalition agreements at the national, regional and local level in Germany by applying quantitative text analysis techniques. The empirical results show that governing parties mostly talk about the policy areas they are legally responsible for. However, particularly local and regional governing parties also address issues that are primarily part of federal jurisdiction.

Electoral Campaigns and Parliamentary Practice: Do Parties Pursue the Issues They Campaigned On?

“…Parties in German local councils primarily draw attention to issues where the local level either has a legal say or oversees the implementation of laws decided at the federal and state levels: the four policy issues with the highest number of written PQs are 'Transportation', 'Education & Culture', 'Community Development & Housing', and 'Environment'. This pattern provides face validity to the data, which is further corroborated by party-specific variations in issue emphasis, presented in Figures A-1 and A-2 in Appendix A, and is in line with previous research on local parties' issue attention when drafting coalition agreements (see Gross & Krauss, 2021).…”

“…Third, the possibility for voters to hold politicians accountable at the local level is hampered in Germany because party competition and legislative decision‐making across the different levels of the German multi‐level system are closely interrelated (Däubler & Debus, 2009; Gross & Krauss, 2021; Stecker, 2016), leading to low values on both ‘institutional clarity’ and ‘government clarity’ compared to other European states (Hobolt et al., 2013). This creates incentives for political parties to emphasise issues that are not primarily dealt with at the respective level where the electoral campaign and parliamentary activity is taking place, since most voters are unable to correctly assign responsibilities in complex multi‐level systems such as the one in Germany (see, e.g., Däubler et al., 2018).…”

Extra-coalitional policy bargaining: investigating the power of committee chairs

“…Stecker 2015). As shown by Gross and Krauss (2019), both areas are relevant elements in state coalition agreements: they are among the top five policies with regard to attention in the coalition agreements at the state level. Within these fields, we expect to see relevant and from the national course of action independent policy-making that has the potential to cause policy disagreements within a coalition.…”

Studying politics at the local level in Germany: a tale of missing data

“…Given that local governments, particularly local administrations in Germany, manage important policy areas (such as childcare, public transit, and levying local taxes, fees and charges, to name a few) and act as executors of federal and state laws (Benz and Zimmer 2011 ; Gross and Krauss 2023 ), it is surprising how little we know about local politicians’ preferences and how they shape their policy-making decisions. Only a small number of studies exist that identify how political preferences of local politicians impact local policy positions and policy output, for example with regard to registration fees for same-sex unions (Debus et al.…”