Investigating the black box of policymaking: multidimensional legislative bargaining in Germany

Existing research shows that coalition agreements are crafted based on participating parties’ preferences, and that coalition governments often follow through with their promises in such agreements. However, little is known of how policy bargaining takes place during legislative periods, particularly how coalition governments transform bullet-point agreements into actual policies under pressures from both within and outside coalition governments. Using a unique dataset of parliamentary recordings in Germany from 1949-2021 (GermaParl) and a novel Transformer-based position scaling technique, this study measures the overlaps of preferences distributions between parties in the German parliament. Preliminary results show that coalition parties do not always agree with each other more than they do with opposing parties, especially on topics not extensively covered in coalition agreements.