Monitoring Coalition Partners through Parliamentary Questions: Evidence from Ireland

Abstract

How do governing parties control their coalition partners? Recent studies show that parties use control mechanisms (e.g., parliamentary committees, junior ministers) to oversight coalition partners’ ministers. This paper argues that written parliamentary questions serve as an additional monitoring mechanism in coalition governments. I test this argument by studying the Fine Gael-Labour government in Ireland between 2011 and 2016. I find that legislators in governing parties ask more questions to the ministers of a coalition partner. Moreover, quantitative text analysis focused on the Minister for Finance shows that such questions are used to obtain information on divisive policy issues rather than to appeal to their constituencies. These results suggest that parliamentary questions constrain “ministerial drift” and facilitate cooperative policy making in coalition governments.