Legislators have a strong incentive to belong, control and head parliamentary committees. Committees are important venues for legislative scrutiny and are therefore central to understand the strategic interactions among governmental parties. Committee chairs are particularly influential in most parliaments. Why then is the distribution of committee chairs among the coalition partners uneven? And how does it reflect the conflict structure of coalitional decisison-making? Using newly codded data from Portugal and Sweden I show that coalition partners create conditions to scrutinize each other by strategically placing committee chairs in portfolios/issues of particular importance to the party. This provides credibility to the threat to scrutinize policies introduced by the coalition partner. It is mostly the smaller coalition partner(s) which rely on this mechanism.