Policy Agendas in Coalition Agreements: The Enduring Influence of Policy Inheritance

Abstract

New governments frequently inherit issues from their predecessors, and as a result, various policy problems tend to remain on the agenda for many years. Previous research examining the role of policy inheritance has focused mainly on the agenda during a government's term in office. These studies find that because governments must first contend with the problems they inherit, there is considerably less room for new issues to emerge on the agenda. This study seeks to examine the idea of policy inheritance through the lens of coalition agreements. Coalition agreements, a feature of multiparty governments, are drafted shortly after elections and reflect the outcome of the political struggle. For this reason, one can expect that coalition agreements contain mostly issues that parties regard as important. By implication, changes in the coalition agreements' issue agenda would be a function of the political change produced by the electoral cycle, rather than of inheritance. Analyzing coalition agreements in three countries—Israel, the Netherlands, and Norway—across 42 elections, we find no evidence for this assumption. Agendas in coalition agreements do not vary with changes in the party composition of the coalition, changes in the ideological distance between parties, or changes in the party holding the office of Prime Minister. This indicates that even when new coalition governments are preparing for their term in office, inheritance remains the primary driver of agenda‐setting.