In this article the authors study delegation problems within multiparty coalition
governments. They argue that coalition parties can use the committee system to
“shadow” the ministers of their partners; that is, they can appoint committee
chairs from other governing parties, who will then be well placed to monitor
and/or check the actions of the corresponding ministers. The authors
analyze which ministers should be shadowed if governing parties seek to
minimize the aggregate policy losses they suffer as the result of ministers pursuing
their own parties’ interests rather than the coalition’s. Based on data
from 19 mostly European parliamentary democracies, the authors find that the
greater the policy disagreement between a minister’s party and its partners,
the more likely the minister is to be shadowed
