Party linkages, coalition oversight mechanisms, and executive oversight

Studies of parliamentary politics in countries with programmatic parties have found that there is more executive oversight under coalition governments than under single-party, majority governments. Yet, we should not expect government type to impact executive oversight in the same manner in countries with clientelistic parties. In countries with clientelistic parties, regardless of government type, the ruling parties should centralise power within the executive and avoid oversight. In the data analysis, I use data from the Party Government in Europe dataset (Hellström et al., Citation2023), from Martin and Vanberg (Citation2020), and from the Varieties of Democracy dataset (Coppedge et al., Citation2023) to demonstrate that in countries with clientelistic parties, government type does not impact executive oversight the same way it does in countries with programmatic parties. Instead, coalition governments in countries with clientelistic parties are less likely to engage in executive oversight than coalition governments in countries with programmatic parties are.