High Politics in the Low Countries: An Empirical Study of Coalition Agreements in Belgium and The Netherlands

This title was first published in 2003.This informative text deals with the emergence of coalition agreements, their contents, the problem of enforcement and with the question of whether or not the functions are performed in practice. It explores the idea that policy bargaining in government formation is not just an isolated process, but that it is a real chance for parties to deal with substantive and controversial issues at an early stage. The coalition agreements in which these issues ar...