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Institutions and coalitions in policy processes: a cross-sectoral comparison

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2014

Manuel Fischer
Manuel Fischer*
Affiliation:
Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Research and Technology Eawag and University of Berne, Switzerland E-mail: manuel.fischer@eawag.ch
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Abstract

Actors with joint beliefs in a decision-making process form coalitions in order to translate their goals into policy. Yet, coalitions are not formed in an institutional void, but rather institutions confer opportunities and constraints to actors. This paper studies the institutional conditions under which either coalition structures with a dominant coalition or with competing coalitions emerge. It takes into account three conditions, i.e. the degree of federalism of a project, its degree of Europeanisation and the openness of the pre-parliamentary phase of the decision-making process. The cross-sectoral comparison includes the 11 most important decision-making processes in Switzerland between 2001 and 2006 with a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Results suggest that Europeanisation or an open pre-parliamentary phase lead to a dominant coalition, whereas only a specific combination of all three conditions is able to explain a structure with competing coalitions.

Keywords

coalitionsinstitutionspolicy processQCASNASwitzerland
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Public Policy , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , August 2015 , pp. 245 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2014 

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