Is the governing coalition a strategic coalition? Analysing the relationship between political group characteristics, strategic plan quality and strategic consensus

摘要

The meaningfulness and usefulness of a strategic plan is assumed to be contingent upon its ability to assist decision-makers in achieving a shared understanding or agreement. However, there is a lack of insights on how political group characteristics influence this plan-related strategic consensus (SC) in public sector settings. Therefore, the study at hand investigates whether municipal multiparty governing coalitions’ degree of SC is associated with (a) ideological diversity and (b) government power. Based on multi-source data gathered with 1,075 governing coalition members from 256 Flemish municipalities in Belgium, we found that governing coalitions which are more ideologically homogeneous and have less governing power perceived the strategic plan as of higher quality than powerful and ideological dispersed ones, whereas higher scores on the perceived strategic plan quality are related to higher levels of SC.