The appointment of committee chairs to monitor the actions of ministers belonging to coalition partners has received considerably less attention than other mechanisms of policing the coalition agreement at executive or legislative level. We take a longitudinal perspective focusing on 11 Belgian cabinets (1980–2018) to study the determinants of such appointments and whether there is a substitution effect between shadow chairs, junior ministers and coalition agreements. Our findings indicate that the probability of appointing a shadow committee chair is higher when the ideological distance between the minister's party and the coalition is larger. Other key findings are that ministers facing hostile junior ministers tend to be shadowed by committee chairs as well, while shadow chairs are also more frequent in minimum winning coalitions.

We analyse United States presidential appointee positions subject to Senate confirmation without a confirmed appointee in office. These “vacant” positions are byproducts of American constitutional design, shaped by the interplay of institutional politics. Using a novel dataset, we analyse appointee vacancies across executive branch departments and single-headed agencies from 1989 to 2013. We develop a theoretical model that uncovers the dynamics of vacancy onset and length. We then specify an empirical model and report results highlighting both position and principal–agent relations as critical to the politics of appointee vacancies. Conditional on high status positions reducing the frequency and duration of vacancies, we find important principal–agent considerations from a separation of powers perspective. Appointee positions in agencies ideologically divergent from the relevant Senate committee chair are vacant for less time than in ideologically proximal agencies. Importantly, this relationship strengthens as agency ideology diverges away from the chair and towards the chair’s party extreme.

Research during the past six decades has found that parties joining coalition governments receive payoffs, in the form of government posts, in proportion to their coalition share. These findings, however, do not indicate which coalition partners receive payoffs that will most enable them to influence their preferred policies. This article joins recent qualitative analyses of coalition allocation and examines payoffs in terms of the salience of positions relative to the policy goals of the parties receiving them. The single-country study of eight Israeli governments from 1992 to 2015 integrates quantitative and qualitative analyses of coalition payoffs. This article contributes to coalition allocation research by expanding the scope of coalition payoffs to include junior ministers and committee chairs, and by distinguishing payoff outcomes for different party families. The results show an edge for formateur parties in obtaining policy-salient ministerial payoffs and an advantage to non-formateurs for policy-salient deputy (junior) minister positions.