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WOS:000289715000006 (Nº de Acesso Web of Science) ; "Prémio Científico ISCTE-IUL 2012" ; In coalition government, the relationship between parties and ministers is one of double delegation: from the party to the minister and from the coalition of parties to the individual minister. On the basis of principal—agent theory, I argue that a coalition agreement is a tool used by coalition parties to reduce agency loss when delegating to ministers. In six governments in Belgium, Italy and The Netherlands, I show that: a majority of the pledges were transferred into cabinet decisions, a majority of cabinet decisions were effectively constrained by the coalition agreement and that one-third of cabinet decisions had been precisely defined beforehand in the document. Interestingly, the length of the coalition agreement, the entry of party leaders to government and the number of ministers participating in the negotiations do not seem to have had a significant influence on the above two measurements.

Coalition agreements in the Italian Second Republic have traditionally been pre-electoral, often long, compre-hensive but vague documents serving also as electoral manifestos for centre-right or centre-left coalitions. In this article, we analyse the 2018 post-electoral coalition agreement between the Movimento Cinque Stelle and Lega in comparative perspective, contrasting this agreement with former coalition programmes enforced since the mid-1990s in Italy and the pre-election manifestos published by these two political parties. The analysis reported here allow us to conclude that the first post-electoral coalition agreement in Italy is shorter than most centre-left documents, as vague as previous agreements and constitutes a compromise committing the Lega to less right-wing positions, the grillini to less progressive stances and both political forces to tone down their Eu-roscepticism. The extent by which these commitments are solid and longstanding is unknown. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion