Short abstract: Which kind of decisions are passed by Cabinet in coalition governments? What motivates ministerial action? Do what extent do these actions answer to unforeseen external pressures?
While these are fascinating questions, it must be acknowledged that they remain largely unanswered. This paper addresses these queries. It focuses on important ministerial decisions in Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. Basing itself on content analysis of weekly newspapers and on face-to-face interviews with more than 60 former ministers or their closest collaborators, it tries to track back the origin of every important decisions passed by the Council of Ministers. It shows that a (surprisingly) large majority of important cabinet decisions originates from the coalition program and one third of these decisions has even been precisely defined beforehand. Around one third of these decisions are triggered by European or international obligations. Only a very small minority (2%) of important decisions follow a focusing event which had not been foreseen in the coalition agreement.
This research demonstrated the crucial impact of political parties in the agenda-setting process. It shows that political parties are able- to a very large extent - to endogenize policy change before government inauguration.

Short bio: Catherine Moury is Assistant Professor at the Lisbon University Institute. Her research focuses on institutional change in the European Union and on coalition governments, about which she has published in journals such as European Journal of Public Policy, West European Politics and Party Politics. She is the author of Coalition Government and Party Mandate: How coalition agreements constrain ministerial action (Routledge, 2012) and Changing rules of delegation: A contest of Power for Comitology (with A. Héritier, C. Bisschoff e C-F. Bergström, Oxford University Press, 2012). Her article Explaining the European Parliament's Right to Appoint and Invest the Commission: Interstitial Institutional Change, published in West European Politics in 2007, has been awarded the Vincent Wright Memorial Prize and the Gulbenkian Prize for the internationalization of Social Science.