The success and longevity of coalition governments depends on the ability to keep conflicts between coalition members at bay. The risk of such conflicts is often assessed by drawing on proxy measures, such as the ideological heterogeneity among government parties. This article presents a new approach to measuring the atmosphere between government parties. The ‘coalition mood’ is a time-varying measure that draws on applause patterns between coalition partners during legislative debates. The article exemplifies the measurement approach based on automated analyses of over 105,000 plenary debates in Germany and Austria. The article then assesses the measure's face, concurrent and predictive validity. It finds the measure well aligned with qualitative evidence, shows that the coalition mood is correlated with poll ratings of the government parties and helps to predict the duration of legislative processes. The conclusion highlights future applications of the coalition mood for research on coalition politics and public policy.

While coalition agreements are significant in structuring government behaviour, their comprehensiveness varies considerably across cabinets. We argue that the average correspondence between parties' priorities and portfolio allocation is important in explaining the comprehensiveness of coalition agreements because coalition parties that have obtained their preferred portfolios have less incentive to negotiate a detailed coalition agreement. We test our argument by combining newly collected data on coalition agreements drafted by 218 cabinets in 24 Western and Eastern European countries from 1945 to 2014 with data on the distribution of ministerial portfolios. We find that the shorter and less comprehensive the agreements, the higher the correspondence between parties' priorities and portfolio allocation. Our results have important implications for our understanding of coalition governments and the relationship between government formation and cabinet governance.

The appointment of committee chairs to monitor the actions of ministers belonging to coalition partners has received considerably less attention than other mechanisms of policing the coalition agreement at executive or legislative level. We take a longitudinal perspective focusing on 11 Belgian cabinets (1980–2018) to study the determinants of such appointments and whether there is a substitution effect between shadow chairs, junior ministers and coalition agreements. Our findings indicate that the probability of appointing a shadow committee chair is higher when the ideological distance between the minister's party and the coalition is larger. Other key findings are that ministers facing hostile junior ministers tend to be shadowed by committee chairs as well, while shadow chairs are also more frequent in minimum winning coalitions.

Ministers can have an incentive to adopt policies through secondary legislation that deviates from the general compromise reached via the primary legislation. We suggest that when secondary legislation is at stake, in some countries coalition partners can rely upon the ex-ante legal scrutiny of courts as an extra-cabinet control mechanism. We focus on the interaction between governments and the Council of State, the highest administrative court and the most important consultative body of the government in Italy. Our findings support the general hypothesis that the Council's activism as an advisor is generated by the demand for control mechanisms on the secondary legislation. Such a demand is affected by specific political conditions, i.e. the level of government heterogeneity and government alternation. The findings on the Italian case can be a starting point for research on the different levels of involvement of administrative courts in the executive politics that characterize European Democracies.

In analysing governance and social policy in Northern Ireland in the period of devolution 1999–2002 Eithne McLaughlin described and predicted the dominance of a lowest common denominator approach to the formulation of social policies. This paper examines the period of restored devolution 2007–11 using this thesis. It identifies the trends in the development of social policies after 2007 and examines social policy-making by the government under five categories. Having established the reasons for this complex approach to social policy formulation, consideration is also given to the outcomes of the policy process.

Italian party coalitions (from both the centre-left and the centre-right) have enacted an average of 57% of the pledges included in their common manifestos. In relative terms, Italian political parties keep their electoral promises much less than parties governing in single-party government, but slightly outperform those that form post-electoral coalitions. Although this finding contradicts the widespread pessimism about Italy's performance, it also illustrates that there is no significant advantage to bipolarism and the existence of a common programme as opposed to situations where coalitions are formed after the elections. This might explain Italians’ dissatisfaction with the way democracy works in their country.