Abstract
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.
A democratic mandate requires parties to fulfil the electoral promises given to their voters. 1 Once elected, parties should work on implementing their pledges because their success or failure will probably result in their electoral reward or punishment. 2 This is why parties not able to create single-party governments enter coalition governments. In coalitions, they expect to gain policy influence over their promised policies, especially those that are the most important for their voters. However, because parties are not alone in coalition, their coalition partners constrain their ability to fulfil their pledges. Studies in the pledge approach usually point to a number of factors—at the pledge, the party, but also the institutional level—that influence party pledge fulfilment positively or negatively. 3 This article is concerned with whether the fact that a coalition government has a majority or minority status influences the strategies and results of coalition parties in their pledge fulfilment work.
In majority coalitions, parties have the motivation and tools to control other coalition parties’ ability to fulfil their pledges. Parties in minority coalitions are at an additional disadvantage due to the fact that the opposition parties have a parliamentary majority and can prematurely end the government’s life if they want. Minority governments often have shorter durability, so their parties must count on a shorter time to fulfil what they promised. And it is also important that, having formed a minority coalition, parties find it necessary to bargain with one or more additional actors, the opposition party or parties, and somehow satisfy their interests to achieve a parliamentary majority for their legislative proposals.
Despite a shorter duration 4 and the fact that the government must bargain with the opposition parties, the pledge-approach case studies from Italy, Ireland, and Germany show that even substantive minority coalitions are able to reach a “reasonable” degree of pledge fulfilment. 5 Moreover, Thomson et al.ʼs broad comparative study showed that minority and majority coalitions do not differ in pledge fulfilment rates. 6 The explanations point to the fact that the biggest probability of fulfilling pledges is at the beginning of the electoral cycle. So if minority governments have less time, they do not necessarily fulfil many fewer pledges than other government types. 7 In addition, a dissolution threat can heighten a minority government’s bargaining capacity, especially at the beginning of the electoral cycle. 8
In this context, it is important to note that there are important differences in minority governments that can influence their pledge fulfilment work. When the minority government has stable support from the opposition party or parties, perhaps even secured by a written document, its function can be very similar to majority governments and is called a “majority coalition in disguise.” 9 On the other hand, so-called “substantive minority governments” do not have stable partners and have to create legislative coalitions with different partners. 10 Minority governments also have an advantage if they take a central position in the policy space, can bargain with opposition parties from both sides of the policy spectrum, and thus have agenda-setting power similar to majority governments. 11 In addition, the opposition’s features, such as its unity and probability to achieve government, also increase the opposition’s pressure on government. 12 However, if minority government parties want to be re-elected, they should create a kind of strategy to fulfill their pledges that is distinct from majority governments. This article deals with this kind of substantive minority coalition government without stable supporting parties. I follow the current literature focused on pledge-fulfilment strategies in minority coalition parties, 13 and test new hypotheses about their pledge fulfilment work.
The expectations of party strategies are taken from the issue salience and dynamic agenda setting literature, expecting that government parties will focus on fulfilling the most salient pledges in their manifestos, and also on the pledges that are generally salient for the whole public. Adding these expectations to the context of substantive minority governments, their parties face the opposition actors with veto power and their own distinct policy motivations. Compared with majority governments, the odds of adopting their party-salient pledges should be lower for minority coalition parties, and the odds of adopting the pledges formulated in public-salient issues should also be influenced by their minority government status. The mutual relationship of these variables is also tested in the article.
Novel hypotheses about the difference in pledge fulfilment between minority and majority coalition parties are tested on three Czech coalition governments formed after the 2006, 2010, and 2013 elections (i.e., one substantive minority coalition without the median position and two majority coalition governments) during the first 654 days (i.e., almost two years) of their mandate. There are at least three reasons why the research was applied to the Czech case. Firstly, the differences in pledge fulfilment between majority and minority coalition governments have been neglected not only here but also in research on other young Central-Eastern European democracies. The Czech Republic has experienced majority and minority coalition governments. Therefore, it is a good case to study the different effects of government types on pledge fulfilment in one country. Secondly, from the small number of studies in this area, we know that pledge fulfilment is worse and with partially different features than in Western Europe. 14 Parties are usually young, nonstable, and do not have either strong programmatic positions on issues or strong ties with their voters. Czech parties fit the idea of Central-Eastern party systems very well, which increases the importance of studying their strategies to fulfil their pledges once in government. 15 Thirdly, the Czech case includes a case of a substantive minority government in a disadvantageous position. The government existed without generally recognized supporting parties, and even had hostile relations with a relatively united opposition. It won confidence thanks to two dissenting MPs from the biggest opposition party, who later supported some government proposals with no written agreement. Minority governments are relatively widespread in East-Central Europe; they were formed in 38 percent of cases until 2020 and around 43 percent of them had no supporting parties. 16 This makes the results of the analyses important for further thinking about various pledge fulfilment types in this region.
Pledge Fulfilment of Majority and Minority Coalition Parties
This article is focused on the substantive minority governments’ compromise strategy towards opposition parties. Minority governments should be flexible in seeking support for their policy proposals among opposition parties and be able to fulfil opposition party pledges in exchange for the support of government preferences. 17 This was found by Matthieß who showed that minority coalition parties adopt fewer pledges into coalition agreements, which opens the space for policy proposal negotiations with opposition parties, and their support in exchange for government support of some of their pledges. 18 The content of minority government pledges also has an effect on opposition support. Ideological policy divisiveness for the government and opposition negatively impacts on the chance for government bills to be implemented, while the bills on less divisive issues are more probably implemented. 19 I follow this line of argument and formulate the hypotheses that in a substantive minority government without a central policy position, parties must, compared to majority coalitions, make concessions towards opposition parties and apply accommodative strategies towards them. I aim to add two expectations on the importance of government party issues following the broadly accepted issue-salience theory 20 and dynamic policy agenda theory. 21 In the following part, I firstly introduce the expectations with regard to party motivation on issue salience and then argue why and how they can be changed if minority coalitions aim to fulfil their pledges.
Party Issue Salience in Minority Governments
Issue salience and issue ownership theories suggest that parties emphasize different policy priorities rather than trying to oppose each other on the same policy issues. Moreover, parties are able to persuade voters to consider their emphasized policy issues as important for their vote. 22 Following this electoral strategy, the parties cannot abandon their emphasized issues when they enter a coalition government. Not only they are expected to attempt to fulfil what they promised because voter reward or punishment is connected to their own pledges. They should also concentrate on issues that are salient for them because they aim to be seen as the most competent in them. This expectation was repeatedly confirmed by the office allocation theory, showing that government parties aim to get the ministries corresponding to their most emphasized manifesto issues. 23 A similar strategy connects the policy-seeking perspective: parties need to set apart from their coalition partners, stress their own policy profile and concentrate on enacting pledges that are unequivocally identifiable with them. Failing to enact these pledges means a higher threat of electoral costs. 24 In party communication, this strategy was confirmed by Klüver and Sagarazzu, who found that coalition parties stressed their own policy profile to show their bargaining power to voters in the first government period. 25 Hübscher showed similar results in the case of government laws. 26
However, because all coalition parties share this selfish motivation, they constantly face the danger of their partners using control mechanisms to keep them in line with the agreed coalition agreement. As Eichorst shows, in writing coalition agreements, parties are motivated to push policies that are not salient for other parties because the veto players have no motivation to constrain them and the policies serve as an advertisement for party competences and their bargaining abilities. 27 The coalition partners instead constrain the pledges if they are salient for their coalition partners but do not align with their own preferences. 28 This can be the reason why party issue salience has been found to be a insignificant factor for pledge fulfilment. 29 The results confirming the expectation about the positive influence of party issue salience were descriptively shown only by Artés and Bustos. 30
Each opposition party that ad hoc supports a minority government’s law proposal can be counted as a potential new veto player. While the opposition party is aiming to force through its own policy preferences, its goal should simultaneously be to constrain the government partiesʼ success in fulfilling their most important and distinctive pledges, because government has more expansive tools to successfully advertise its pledge-fulfilment gains. Because opposition parties are able to adopt a significant number of their own pledges 31 and can also make themselves crucial for the adoption of coalition partiesʼ pledges, they are able to constrain adopting pledges that can be distinctively rewarding for coalition parties.
Minority governments located in the centre of the political spectrum can form legislative coalitions with various opposition partners. They might agree with a left-positioned opposition party moving a policy more to the left, or with a right-positioned opposition party more to the right. 32 If the opposition is, however, one-sided, as is the Czech case, this opportunity disappears.
Moreover, even when the government applies an accommodative strategy towards opposition demands, as Moury and de Giorgi et al. 33 argue, the more a party and its electorate assigns relevance to an issue, the more costly it is to behave consensually. This can be applied not only to opposition parties but also to coalition parties that are less willing to compromise on their party salient pledges. I, therefore, expect not only that the opposition parties will play against government partiesʼ salient pledges, but also that the minority government parties will be less likely to move towards a consensus with them. So, the success of minority parties’ pledges will be smaller than that of majority government parties.
Hypothesis 1: Compared to majority governments, the odds of pledge fulfilment are decreased in a minority coalition as the party issue salience increases.
Representation of Public Salient Issues in Minority Governments
Besides satisfying the party electorate’s preferences, there is also a broader motivation to satisfy the preferences of the public as a whole. Parties react to what is important for the whole electorate and emphasize it in their campaigns; this strategy is called “riding the wave.” 34 After the elections, parties are theoretically expected to continue the strategy and prioritise pledge fulfilment in publicly salient issues in order to reflect the public’s priorities. This expectation is elaborated on by the agenda setting and dynamic representation theorists. 35 Basically, the expectation for the government is to respond to mass preferences on the most important issues. Moreover, changes in the publicʼs priorities shall be associated with the changes in the government’s policy agenda. The motivation is driven electorally, as in the previous case. “If the government fails to enact policies that are supported by the electorate, it may be replaced by a government which is more in line with public preferences.” 36 Therefore, even when some government parties do not prioritize some issues that later became publicly salient, they should turn to them within their government period. The response to the whole electorate’s priorities has been repeatedly found in different types of government behaviour: for legislative and executive work, 37 speeches in Parliament, 38 and public spending. 39
In the language of pledges, the expectation should be translated into a focus on enacting party pledges formulated in the publicly most salient issues, even when these issues were not salient for the party. By doing that, the party can demonstrate its responsiveness to public priorities. In the pledge approach, the issues salient for the whole electorate were found to have a positive effect on pledge fulfilment, 40 and also on timely approval of government bills. 41
Institutional variation, such as the division of powers and the differences between majoritarian and proportional parliamentary democracy, moderate the connection between public preferences and government agendas. As Borghetto and Belchior suggest, a vivid strategy of minority governments to neutralize opposition attacks is just to address the issues that opposition parties raise. 42 Because opposition parties also respond to the public, they should, in accordance with the agenda setting theory, attempt to influence the content of government policy in the public salient issues. Thus, the minority government parties’ pledge fulfilment ought to be more probable when the issue’s public salience increases, even when opposition parties are able to accommodate the final content of the pledges.
However, as Moury and Fernandes aptly point out, “opposition parties, in all contexts, are more adversarial when governmental bills are salient.” 43 If the parties’ manifesto solutions are divisive, the likelihood that the government and opposition will reach a consensus about the government’s pledges is smaller. This was showed by Moury, De Giorgi, and Ruivo in the case of Portugal during the economic crisis: when socio-economic issues increased in public salience, the consensus between the government and opposition decreased over time. 44 Minority government party pledge fulfilment in publicly salient issues can be constrained in the same way. Following this, the effect of publicly salient issues can be negative on minority government parties’ pledge fulfilment compared to that of majority government.
Thus, because there are two ways minority governments and the opposition deal with publicly salient issues and there is no argument for which way shall be preferential, I formulate two working hypotheses with opposite effects:
Hypothesis 2a: Compared to majority governments, the odds of pledge fulfilment are increased in a minority coalition when the public issue salience increases.
Hypothesis 2b: Compared to majority governments, the odds of pledge fulfilment are decreased in a minority coalition when the public issue salience increases.
Finally, it makes sense to also think about the interconnectedness of the two variables. Because the two motivations work simultaneously, they can influence each other’s impact. The question is, what if the issue is not salient at all, salient only in one dimension, or what if it is salient for both the party and the public? Thus, the expected mutual situations are included in the empirical chapter.
Case Selection and Data
This article examines data on parties from three Czech coalition governments formed after the elections in 2006, 2010, and 2013, the first governments in the electoral period to get the confidence of the Chamber of Deputies (see Table 1). The three governments include one minority and two majority governments, and thus, they serve as a good sample to study the expected differences between majority and minority coalitions in enacting party pledges. The first, centre-right coalition government was formed by Mirek Topolánek. The coalition consisted of the centre-right ODS (Civic Democratic party), centrist KDU-ČSL (Christian Democrats), and SZ (Green Party). The coalition had a minority status because government parties disposed 100 MPs, that is, exactly the half of their absolute number in the Chamber of Deputies. Even when the government had the median party, which was the Green party with only 6 MPs, the government only faced the leftist opposition parties and was not able to look to rightist opposition parties for support of their proposals. Moreover, the course of the electoral campaign polarized the two biggest parties, ODS and the leftist ČSSD. The second opposition party, the Communists, was not an acceptable partner for the government parties for historical and symbolic reasons. The minority coalition did not enter policy bargaining with any of the opposition parties (Social Democrats and Communist party). The vote of confidence was gained thanks to two Social Democratic MPs abstaining from the vote, but even with these two MPs, there was no formal or informal agreement created with the coalition. To push important laws (such as the budget, which needs to be accepted by 101 MPs), the government needed to search repeatedly for help from the ČSSD “deserters,” who at least declaratively requested programatic concessions from the government. The social democrats then accused these two MPs of being corrupt because they voted for the government’s proposals. The government promised to make important reforms in the social system and health care, and the presidency of the European Council was among its tasks. In 2008, the economic recession started and the intra-party and intra-coalition conflicts increased in intensity. The hostility with opposition parties is proved by the fact that government went through repeated attempts by the opposition to declare non-confidence, which was finally successful in March 2009. Topolánek’s government had 850 days to fulfil its pledges. After the election in 2010, Petr Nečas’s central-right government took power. It included ODS, conservative TOP 09 (Tradition, Responsibility, Prosperity 2009) which emerged after the split of KDU-ČSL in 2009, and the centrist populist VV (Public Affairs). Nečas’s government had a satisfactory majority of 118 out of 200 MPs. After the VV’s split in April 2012, the government was reshuffled. The ministries primarily held by VV were given to the VV splitters’ platform called Liberal Democrats (LIDEM). The first Nečas government was thus in office for 654 days. The last government is Bohuslav Sobotka’s centre-left coalition consisting of ČSSD, centrist populist ANO (Yes Movement) and KDU-ČSL. The majority coalition had 111 MPs and survived the whole electoral period until the election in October 2017. The government had 1361 days to fulfil pledges, until the election.
Coalition Parties and Governments
Note: Total number of legislative seats is 200.
Unit of Analysis
The exact procedure to identify pledges in manifestos as well as the coding of their features and the reliability test results are described in the Appendix.
The data set includes 1376 coalition party narrow pledges. 45 The data comes from manual coding of nine electoral manifestos from government parties. Royed’s definition of a pledge, that is, “commitment to carry out some action or produce some outcome” 46 was used to initially identify the pledges. The procedure was further specified. Pledges were identified as every grammatical sentence consisting of a subject (“we,” “the party”), a noun phrase (the noun and some extensions—adjectives, descriptions of the object), and a verbal phrase (a verb linked to the object and the subject). A narrow pledge must be formulated in sufficient detail for the researcher to evaluate whether the action or result was realized before the end of the parliamentary term. The criteria used to judge fulfilment must, in principle, be provided by the manifesto writers and should be objectively measurable. 47 If value judgments are required to assess fulfilment, the pledge is identified as broad and excluded from analysis.
Dependent Variable
The dependent variable is the fulfilment of a narrow pledge. The variable is binary; the pledge received a value of 1 if the promised action or result was partially or fully provided, and 0 if the action did not happen or if government action was contradictory to the pledge. Because two governments in the sample ended prematurely, the pledge fulfilment was investigated after 654 days of the government (the duration of the shortest Nečas government) to assess the control of the time effect. The evaluation started with an Internet search using the pledge’s key words. The search led to information about the parliamentary debates, laws, responsible institutions, databases, etc. Newspaper articles, official ministry information, government, parliament, and other state institutions’ websites served as sources of information. Information about the date of pledge fulfilment was kept; therefore, the investigation for the Topolánek and Sobotka governments was shortened to 654 days.
Independent Variables
To determine party issue salience, every pledge (broad and narrow) was categorized in subcategories that fell into one of thirteen issue areas (economy, welfare state, budget, education, security, army, foreign affairs, Europe, infrastructure, society, environment, institutional reform, immigration) according to the coding scheme of Dolezal et al, 48 with the addition of several prominent topics in Czech politics. Issue salience equals the percentage of pledges dedicated to the issue: if a party dedicated 20 percent of pledges to the economy, every party pledge devoted to the economy was coded with the value 20.
General issue salience was measured on the basis of post-election surveys (Institute of Sociology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 2006, 2010, 2013a). I used answers to a question about the first and second most important issues in the election. The answers from each coalition party’s voters were attributed to one of the thirteen policy issues and weighted in order to emphasize the difference between the first and second most important issue for 2006 and 2010 (the first answer was given double the weight of second answers). The values were attributed to pledges in each issue for all parties in a given coalition.
To capture the potential interdependence of party and public salience, a party/public salience variable was created. Pledges in each category were coded firstly as dummy variables. If the pledge’s party salience was smaller than the party median, it was coded 0; otherwise, it was coded 1. The same was done for public salience in each election year. Then the categorical variable was created by combining the two newly created variables. The variable includes four categories (0 if both party and public salience were smaller than the median, 1 if only the party salience was higher/equal to median, 2 if only the public salience was higher/equal to the median, and 3 if both party and public salience were higher than their median).
Majority government is a dummy variable coded 1 for majority government party pledges, and 0 for minority government parties.
Control variables
Control variables include the features of pledges and parties that have been previously found to influence pledge fulfilment.
Coalition agreement (i.e., the adoption of a pledge into a coalition agreement) is a binary variable. For evaluating the adoption of a pledge into the coalition agreement, the coalition agreements created by coalition parties were used. The adoption of a pledge (value 1) means either the complete pledge (full adoption) or a limited version of the pledge was manifested in the coalition agreement (partial adoption). In the case that no action or result regarding the pledge was mentioned in the coalition agreement, the pledge was coded as non-adopted (value 0). A pledge adopted into a coalition agreement should have a greater likelihood of fulfilment. 49
Portfolio is a binary variable. The pledge was coded as 1 if the pledging party gained the ministerial portfolio that had had the area of the pledge in its competencies. Otherwise, the pledge was coded 0. Holding portfolio should increase the likelihood of pledge fulfilment, although the results are mixed for some countries, reflecting the constrains on ministers in some governments, and including previous studies of Czech Republic. 50
Status quo pledge is a dummy variable and represents the policy status quo at the time of coalition bargaining. To identify the pledge as status quo, the party must declare the desire to maintain the status quo (e.g., by the use of verbs, such as “we will maintain” and “we won’t change”). Value 1 is given to a status quo pledge; the remaining pledges were coded 0. A status quo pledge is among the factors most likely to positively influence pledge fulfilment. 51
Consensus for government parties is a categorical variable. For every pledge, I looked to see if there were pledges consensually related to the broad or narrow pledges of other government parties. One party’s pledge is considered to be consensually related to the second party’s pledge if the fulfilment of the second party pledge would automatically result in the partial or complete fulfilment of the former party pledge. Although consensus pledges are mostly coded as a binary variable, it is usually because there are only two coalition parties. However, because there were always three coalition parties in the Czech case, the variable gets values 0, 1, or 2 to catch the intuition that when more parties agree to do the same, the probability of pledge fulfilment will be greater. An increase in the value of consensus pledges is expected to increase the likelihood of fulfilment. 52
Consensus for opposition parties is also a categorical variable coded similarly to the previous variable. For every pledge, I looked to see if there were pledges consensually related to the broad and narrow pledges of opposition parties. One party’s pledge is considered to be consensually related to the second party’s pledge if the fulfilment of the second party’s pledge would automatically result in the partial or complete fulfilment of the former party’s pledge. Because there were two opposition parties in 2006 and 2010 and four opposition parties in 2013, I created a 3-value variable, reaching the values 0, 1, or 2 and more. Increase in the value of this variable is expected to increase the likelihood of pledge fulfilment.
Analysis
Before moving on to the statistical analysis, Table 2 shows the success rate of narrow pledges fulfilled in the three governments after 654 days in government. The time period equals 1.8 years, so the previously found information on parties fulfilling the majority of their pledges at the beginning of the term or preferring their party-salient issues in this period can apply to these cases too. Firstly, there are fewer narrow pledges in the manifestos of the Nečas and Sobotka governments than the Topolánek government. This actually reflects the way the manifestos were written. Parties created very lengthy and comprehensive manifestos in 2006, but their length decreased in 2010 and this tendency continued in 2013, so the decreasing number of pledges is a result of this trend. This likely follows the trend of making the electoral campaigns more professional, which also includes the shortening of manifestos found, for example, by Håkansson and Naurin. 53
Fulfilling Pledges According to Individual Parties
Secondly, there is no clear difference in party pledge fulfilment between the one minority government and the two majority governments. After 654 days of governing, the parties in Topolánek’s minority government were able to fulfil a comparable percentage of their pledges to the parties of Sobotka’s majority government, while the parties of Nečas’s majority government fulfilled a significantly higher percentage of their pledges. The results of minority government parties have, however, higher absolute numbers for their fulfilled pledges than the most successful Nečas majority government. The substantive minority governments do not necessarily have a disadvantage in the absolute number of their fulfilled pledges in the first two years. As the last two columns show, the parties in governments surviving longer continued to fulfil their pledges after that time. 54 However, the majority of fulfilled pledges dated to the first two years of governance. Regardless of the type of government, there are also interesting differences for individual parties. Firstly, the small Christian Democrats are surprisingly successful in enacting their pledges. This might be a result of their pledge-making strategy: KDU-ČSL had the highest percentage of status quo pledges that are easier to fulfil, especially when the government ends prematurely. The prime ministerial advantage is partially detectable for the prime ministerial parties in the two majority governments, while ODS in the minority government fulfilled only 10 percent of its pledges, much less than its smaller coalition parties. This might be the result of the press that the prime ministerial parties face in minority governments. 55
Table 3 presents the four logit regression models with pledge fulfilment (after 654 days) as the dependent variable. The first model is included to show the pure effects of issue-salience variables. To evaluate the effect of the issue-salience variables in different government types, interactions with the majority government dummy are included in the second model. The hypotheses are evaluated based on Model 2. The third and fourth model include a party/public salience variable to show the two kinds of salience’s interconnectedness. Odds ratios are presented, meaning that a value higher than 1 shows the variable’s positive effect on the chance of pledge fulfillment; a value below 1 shows a negative effect. I also use marginal effects graphs for my two independent variables to show their precise effect in different government settings. Because the data set includes the whole population of narrow pledges over three governments, I do not focus on the statistical significance of the effects; I rather evaluate their size and direction.
Logit Models of Fulfilling Pledges
Note: Robust standard errors are in brackets. *p < .1; **p < .05; ***p < .01.
Generally, both variables focused on in this article impact pledge fulfilment only very weakly compared to the group of control variables, that is, the factors that have previously and repeatedly been found to have a strong impact on pledge fulfilment. As shown in the first model, both variables decrease the pledge fulfilment odds, which is surprising with regard to the expectations in the issue salience literature. This can, however, be influenced by the differences between majority and minority governments. Regarding hypothesis 1, the increasing party issue salience in the minority government decreases the odds of party pledge fulfilment, compared to majority governments. To see the direction of the effect, Figure 1 shows the marginal effects for party pledge fulfilment according to the status of the government. Compared to parties in majority governments, for whom the increasing party issue salience very slightly increases the change in the likelihood of pledge fulfilment, the increase in party issue salience decreases party pledge fulfilment in the case of Topolánek’s minority government from 22.9 percent for the less important party issues to 17.4 percent for the most important issues. The first hypothesis is, therefore, supported.
Party issue salience
The working hypotheses 2a and 2b both expect that parties in minority governments differ from majority governments in the effect of public salience in fulfilling pledges. However, this difference is not confirmed. As Figure 2 shows, minority governments have a smaller pledge fulfilment probability even for their publicly non-salient pledges (22.6 percent compared to 26.8 percent of majority governments). Increasing public salience further decreases the likelihood of pledge fulfilment for both minority and majority governments. While this finding is counterintuitive for majority governments, which are expected to increase fulfilment probability with public salience, not deviating from the same direction of the effect for minority government parties means that both hypotheses 2a and 2b must be rejected.
Public issue salience
To focus more deeply on the relationship between party and public salience, models 3 and 4 including categorical variable party/public salience were estimated. As the model without interactions shows, compared to fulfilling non-salient pledges (both party and public), all other combinations slightly decrease the fulfilment rate. This shows that pledges that are fairly non-salient do not face strong disagreement from the veto players for both kinds of government. Figure 3 shows marginal effects for majority and minority governments in each situation estimated in the fourth model, which shows a different picture from the continuous variables’ effect.
Party and public salience
For the majority government pledges, low party and public issue salience means 23.5 percent odds of fulfilling pledges, which is almost the same for minority government pledges in the same category. When the pledge is only salient for an individual party, but not publicly salient, it has much lower odds of fulfilment than not being salient at all (15 percent). This responds to the theoretical expectation that party salience increases the resistance of party coalition partners. This does not apply for focused minority government parties. For them, having a pledge that is only salient for them, but not generally, does not change their probability of fulfilling it compared to non-salient pledges.
Highly public salient pledges that are simultaneously not party salient have the highest probability of pledge fulfilment for majority government parties (27.7 percent), which fits the expectation that generally important pledges have priority in government work. 56 On the other hand, having highly publicly (but not party) salient pledges lowers the probability of pledge fulfilment for minority government parties (to 14.8 percent). Finally, for a pledge being both party and publicly salient means a slightly smaller probability of fulfilment than being just publicly salient for majority government parties (25.2 percent). Being party and publicly salient means, however, a lower pledge fulfilment probability for minority government’s parties compared to both majority government parties and also to non-salient pledges (16.8 percent).
The effect of this categorical variable sheds a different light on previous results. Compared to the effects of continual variables (party salience, public salience) that count with the mean value of the rest of variables, categories defined by the median value of party and public salience play out differently for minority and majority governments. For majority governments, the only publicly salient pledges have a higher likelihood of being fulfilled, but only party salience reduces the effect. This shows that the public salience’s effect has an increasing effect on fulfilling pledges for majority governments. For minority governments, however, the high party-salient pledges do not change the probability of being fulfilled and public salience decreases it.
Finally, the control variables confirm the effect that was earlier found in Western as well as in Eastern European countries. They also show the specifics of the Czech case. All the control variables, that is, adopting a pledge in the coalition agreement, holding a corresponding portfolio, status quo pledges, a pledge consensus for the government, and also for opposition parties had the effect of increasing pledge fulfilment odds. The huge effect of the status quo pledge is particularly important, which increases pledge fulfilment odds by 27 times. 57 This especially great effect can be explained by the character of dependent variables (fulfilment of a pledge after 654 days), which means that not changing the status quo in a short time period is very easy.
Conclusion
The article aims to contribute to the studies into the pledge approach to party mandate fulfilment by focusing on party strategies regarding pledge fulfilment in majority and substantive minority governments in the Czech Republic. The tricky question is how the parties that create the minority coalitions accommodate their pledge-fulfilling strategies when they face additional veto player(s), whose interests must be taken into consideration. Following the expectations in the issue ownership and dynamic agenda setting literature, parties focus on fulfilling pledges preferentially in party salient issues and in the public salient issues. Applying these theories to the majority and minority governments, I expected the opposition veto players to act as a new constraint for minority government parties, limiting them in fulfilling party salient pledges. This effect was found to be valid when looking at the Czech data for almost the first two years of governing. For public salience, it was found that minority government party pledges, even when they have smaller probability of fulfilment, do not differ from majority governments in the variable’s decreasing effect. However, the model with a new variable composed of four categories combining low and high party and public salience showed that majority governments have a higher probability of pledge fulfilment in highly publicly salient issues, which is reduced by high party salience. Minority government partiesʼ highly public salient pledges have—on the other hand—a much lower probability of fulfilment regardless of whether the pledges were simultaneously party salient. The results thus show that a majority opposition can successfully limit the opportunity for a minority government to fulfil its publicly salient pledges and increase it for majority government parties.
Although minority governments are generally expected to be flexible and look for consensus between different parties, this is not always true. 58 This article argues that the possibility of fulfilling minority government partiesʼ valued pledges is reduced if they face a relatively united one-sided opposition. The context of Topolánek’s minority government should be taken into account to get a deeper understanding of the findings. The government got a vote of confidence thanks to an agreement made with two “deserters” from the biggest opposition party, the Social Democrats. The two MPs, who left their parliamentary club, then sometimes helped the government with the lawmaking process, albeit without a formal agreement. The fact that the minority government did not create a functioning partnership with an opposition party was a likely reason why general issue salience did not lead to its parties having a better chance of fulfilling their pledges in the most generally salient issues. This can be followed by a look at the polarized relationships between the government and opposition parties. Even when the parties emphasized the same issues, their vision of the solutions was not the same. Thus, because the parties did not discuss them, the pledges did not accommodate the opposition’s vision.
New democracies in Central Eastern Europe are rarely studied from the pledge approach perspective, although they are very interesting for a couple of reasons. This article has filled the gap in the pledge fulfilment research in Central-Eastern Europe not only by creating a new data set of pledges in the Czech Republic but also by focusing on the different parties’ strategies in substantive minority and majority coalition governments. The study of minority coalitions is neglected in the pledge approach, and the Czech Republic served as a good case for investigation. By creating and testing new hypotheses focused on broadly accepted party strategies related to emphasizing party and public salient issues, the article showed that if the minority coalition is in a disadvantageous position, that is, without negotiated support from opposition parties, it can be effectively constrained in enacting its most salient pledges, and also in publicly salient pledges. In addition, the polarized relations between the government and opposition effectively reduce motivation and opportunities for the minority government.
These findings make an important contribution to the effectiveness of pledge fulfilment work in substantive minority governments. While the theory regarding minority governments and pledge studies focused on minority governments usually expect bargaining between the minority government and opposition to reach agreement, negotiations with the opposition are not always approached by the minority government, which can lead to varying final pledge fulfilment results. Future studies should focus on comparing the connections between minority governments and opposition parties and their effects on pledge fulfilment rates.
Supplemental Material
On-line_Appendix – Supplemental material for Issue Salience and Pledge Fulfilment in Minority and Majority Coalitions: Evidence from the Czech Republic
Supplemental material, On-line_Appendix for Issue Salience and Pledge Fulfilment in Minority and Majority Coalitions: Evidence from the Czech Republic by Petra Vodová in East European Politics & Societies and Cultures
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Iva Svačinová, Tibor Vocásek, Vít Borčany, and Jan Řežábek for their assistance with the preparation of coding schemes and reliability tests.
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Notes
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