Keeping Tabs on Partners: The Logic of Delegation in Coalition Governments

Abstract

government? In this article, I theorize about the conditions under which coalition partners should make efforts to keep tabs on each other's ministers and the ways in which they might do so. I show that parties in Italian, Dutch, and multiparty Japanese coalitions used their allotments of junior ministerial positions to shadow each other's ministers, while parties in German coalitions relied instead on institutional devices to tie ministers'