Public defence of Lukas Pukelis' PhD thesis

On 1 June, Lukas Pukelis is defending his doctoral dissertation titled “Informal mutual oversight mechanisms in coalition governments: Insights from the Baltic states for theory building”. The public defence takes place at 14.15 at the Senate Hall of the University of Tartu (Ülikooli 18-204).

The supervisor of the dissertation is Professor Vello Pettai (University of Tartu). The opponent is Professor Emeritus Rudolf Bastiaan “Rudy” Andeweg (Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of Leiden).

Synopsis of the dissertation:

Making governmental coalitions work is difficult. After all, they are composed of different parties, which have competing (if not conflicting) interests and different goals. However, since the end of WWII, coalition cabinets became ever more frequent in European democracies and, even more importantly, they managed to govern effectively and achieve cabinet stability against all difficulties. This was done by creating certain informal institutions in the coalition cabinets which help coalition partners to “keep-tabs” on each other. This dissertation calls these institutions Informal Mutual Oversight Mechanisms (IMOMs) and analyses how four of them: cross-appointments of parliamentary committee chairs, cross-appointments of junior ministers, drafting coalition agreements, and creating coalition committees function in the Baltic states. Baltic states were chosen for this work because they, just like the Western European countries, have a high share of coalition cabinets which are quite stable and function well. However, at the same time, their historical development was quite different and much faster. Therefore, the Baltic states offer a unique opportunity to study the development of these IMOMs over time and to gain insights from the people who personally played a major role in creating these institutions. This dissertation finds that the use of IMOMs in the Baltic states was driven largely by same reasons as in Western Europe and that IMOMs there are used in very similar manner. However, due to their different histories, Baltic states have made use of certain IMOMs, like cross-appointing parliamentary committee chairs, to a larger extent then in the Western European countries, while some IMOMs which have been popular in the Western Europe, like cross appointing junior ministers, never gained popularity in the Baltic states. Finally, this dissertation demonstrates that IMOMs are best understood not as separate instruments but rather as a single system of oversight. How these IMOMs are used depends on two factor groups: factors related to the demand for oversight in the coalition cabinet and the costs associated with using these IMOMs. One of the main contributions of the dissertation is bringing more attention to the factors related with the costs of oversight, which have been understudied before.

Click here for the online version of the dissertation.

Forwarded by: 
Heidi Mõttus
Marketing and Communications Assistant
Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies
University of Tartu 
heidi.mottus@ut.ee