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Why do coalition parties settle some policy issues in great detail, whereas other issues are hardly mentioned in coalition agreements? Hanna Bäck has, together with Heike Klüver, studied this question in an analysis of over 200 agreements in 24 West and East European countries.
The results in their analysis show that parties are clearly more likely to spend a lot of effort on negotiating and agreeing on issues that are divisive within the coalition, especially when similar issues are salient to several partners.
The researchers write more about their results in the article “Coalition Agreements, Issue Attention, and Cabinet Governance”, which was recently published in the journal Comparative Political Studies.
