13:15 - 15:30
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Patrícia Calca
Discussant/s:
Veronica Anghel
Meeting Room H

Patrícia Calca
Legislative Scrutiny in Coalition Governments

Simon Davidsson
Party Systems and Parliamentarianism

Francesco Zucchini, Andrea Pedrazzano
Government duration and conflict resolution mechanisms

Alberto Parmigiani
Campaign Contributions and Legislative Behaviour: Evidence from U.S. Congress
Legislative Scrutiny in Coalition Governments
Patrícia Calca
CIES - ISCTE (Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa)

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.