Who Makes a Compromise? Adopting Pledges in Czech Coalition Agreements

Abstract

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.