The literature on the importance of coalition agreements is growing. We know from several studies that coalition agreements constrain parties in government and their ministers, help managing conflicts and influence the legislative process (Strøm & Müller 1999, 2008; Timmermans 2004; Moury, 2010, 2012; Christiansen & Pedersen forthcoming). Hence, coalition agreements are important to the way coalition governments work. However, from a democratic perspective the most important question is to what extent coalition agreements contain government pledges that voters can count on. Are policy pledges stated in coalition agreements implemented into public policy? Moury (2012) provides important insight into this showing that governments do indeed implement a majority of their pledges. This paper will explore the question further by focusing on the special case of minority governments. Minority governments may be expected to be less efficient in implementing their coalition agreements for the simple reason that passing a policy requires further negotiation with opposition parties. However, minority governments may anticipate the reactions of the opposition and formulate a coalition agreement that takes this into account and hereby be equally able to implements their policy programs. Hence, to fully understand the status of minority coalition agreements we need not only to test whether pledges are implemented but also how contested and precise the pledges are compared to pledges made in majority coalition agreements. We test this based on data from three Danish governments of varying majority status. We code all pledges made in the relevant three coalition agreements and discuss in some detail our methodological considerations that arise when dealing with the challenging tasks of coding pledges and not least their fulfillment.
