With a single exception, post-war Italy has always been governed by party coalitions. The way these coalitions were built, however, changed over the last three decades. Before 1994, all political parties competed against each other in election campaigns, and coalitions were formed afterwards. Post-election negotiations were secretive, and coalition agreements were not made public. The introduction of a new electoral law in 1993, a key element of the transition to the so-called Second Republic, provided powerful incentives for political parties to form pre-election coalitions. At the beginning of the new system, these coalitions were not based on coalition agreements. After two legislative terms, coalition parties started issuing coalition manifestoes, that beside the traditional function of party manifestoes also served the function of pre-electoral coalition agreements. These variations – post-election coalitions without formal coalition agreement; pre-election coalitions without formal coalition agreement; pre-election coalitions with coalition agreements – provide an ideal background against which to test hypotheses about the functioning of coalition governance. Based on the content-coding of party manifestoes and governments’ investiture speeches, this paper addresses questions about the differential capacity of individual coalition parties (differing in size and ideological position) to influence the policy agenda of the government under different coalition governance mechanisms.
