The Inclusion of Finnish Parties’ Electoral Pledges in Coalition Agreements

Multiparty governments often employ detailed coalition agreements to mitigate interparty conflicts, maintain government stability and constrain the actions of individual parties and ministers. In addition to procedural rules governing the interactions between government parties, coalition agreements often lay down the most important policy reforms that the government plans to implement and the targets that it seeks to achieve. Previous research on the fulfilment of parties’ campaign pledges has repeatedly concluded that the coalition agreement is an essential step in the process leading from the making of pledges to their fulfilment. That is, if a party succeeds at having its campaign pledge included in the coalition agreement the likelihood that the pledge is eventually fulfilled increases notably. While the number of case studies on the fulfilment of electoral pledges is rapidly growing, the factors affecting the inclusion of pledges in coalition agreements has received considerably less attention. This study draws on an established definition of an electoral pledge as a clear commitment to an action or an outcome whose occurrence can be objectively tested. We differentiate between two major ways in which an electoral pledge can be included in a coalition agreement. First, the coalition agreement can commit the government to fulfilling the pledge, either fully or partially. Second, the coalition agreement may contain general, symbolic support for the pledge without binding the government to any specific action. Taking such symbolic support explicitly into account marks a departure from previous studies on the topic. We hypothesise that especially the pledges of smaller government parties are likely to find symbolic support, in particular if they are not supported by any other party. Unlike previous studies, we also include the pledges made by opposition parties in the analysis, hypothesising that if a pledge made by a government party is supported by an opposition party, its chances of inclusion in the coalition agreement increase. We study the inclusion of Finnish parties’ pledges, as stated in their electoral manifestos, in coalition agreements during three electoral terms (2011–2015, 2015–2019 and 2019–2023). Given the tradition of broad-based coalition governments, the flexibility of interparty cooperation patterns and the strongly institutionalised status of the coalition agreement as a political steering instrument, the Finnish case fits the purposes of this study exceptionally well.