COORDINATION

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet is the most powerful Commonwealth public service department. The secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet is also the head of the federal public service. In its role of co-ordinating government policy and ensuring a consistent and coherent legislative program, the Department has the capacity to return any item it considers conflicts with the government’s overall policy agenda. However, it is unlikely that occasion would arise, since the Department would be involved at an early stage in assisting with the drafting of any significant policy initiatives, so it would not reach an advanced stage without Department approval.

The prime minister (or the president, as he is the real head of the executive and presides over the weekly cabinet meetings) can, for any reason, return materials to ministers for reconsideration. He also can decide to postpone or cancel the project.

The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has no formal authority to return items envisaged for cabinet meetings, but it can do so in principle. The working rule is that items can be approved in cabinet meetings only through the consensus of all the ministers. The prime minister can return items, even if this authority is not granted by law.

The Cabinet Secretariat prepares the early program for cabinet meetings, which then must be approved by the prime minister. This puts him or her in a very strong position to control the cabinet agenda. The Secretariat may contact ministers’ offices to request that the secretary of state make a presentation, present a paper or raise an issue during cabinet discussions. The provision of a written agenda for cabinet meetings and/or written information material for ministers attending takes place at the discretion of the prime minister, further enhancing his power. Special advisers to ministers also play a role in this respect.

In general, Canada’s government office, the PCO, can both legally and de facto return items to initiating departments on the basis of policy considerations. Indeed, this happens frequently. On the other hand, as one deputy minister in Ottawa once observed, “He who writes the first draft, controls policy.” To be sure, central agencies have a heavy hand in the machinery of government in Ottawa. However, there is an ongoing dialogue between central agency staff and line department officials. Things are sorted out before items are “returned” to line departments. Moreover, unless draft legislation has a financial resources component to it, neither Finance nor Treasury Board officials are likely to take a strong interest.

The government office has the ability to return items. Given the dominance of the president in Chile’s system, the president can overrule the advisory ministry if he or she holds a strong particular interest in a special item. But in the day-to-day course of operations, this rarely happens.

The prime minister has the discretionary power to take the actions deemed necessary. However, the fact that most governments have been minority governments implies that consensus and negotiation is involved.

The Prime Minister’s Office has strong gatekeeping powers. It monitors all stages of the policy-making process and is strongly involved in the preparation of draft bills. It can return most items on policy grounds.

The Department of the Taoiseach reviews draft memoranda designated for discussion by the cabinet. Its views are taken into account when these memoranda are revised. The Taoiseach’s office does exercise tight control over the government agenda. In practice, the Taoiseach’s office has agenda control.

Under the Fox administration (2000 – 2006), the presidential office was much more powerful than most individual ministries. Under Calderón, it remains the case that cabinet ministers are expected to answer to the presidential office.

The key policy adviser in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) plays a very influential role in policy processes and regularly intervenes to “pull” cabinet papers that are deemed to be inadequate in some way.

The Office of the Prime Minister plays an important role in coordinating government policy and in ensuring a consistent and coherent legislative program, especially in situations of disagreement between line ministries. It is able to and often does return materials to departments for further work and will frequently work with relevant departments interactively on draft proposals. Both gatekeeping and general policy oversight is shared with the Ministries of Finance and Justice.

Under the Tusk government, the gatekeeping role of the prime minister and its Chancellery has been strong. The prime minister is formally allowed to return items on policy grounds. Moreover, he has enjoyed a strong informal authority, and one of his closest advisers, Michal Boni, has chaired the Council of Ministers’ Permanent Committee, a body that reviews all draft bills before their presentation in cabinet.

The president is very powerful in the Korean constitutional system. There is extensive coordination between ministries, the prime minister’s office and the Blue House in the course of planning cabinet meetings. The president presides over regular cabinet meetings and can legally and de facto return any items envisaged for the meetings as he wishes. In practice this competence is limited only by the expertise of the Blue House and the relatively smaller size of the Blue House bureaucracy. Thus, the de facto ability to return issues depends on their political importance for the president.

The PMO, and more specifically the senior political leadership, has full control over policy matters and can return items on several different grounds. Since Sweden has been traditionally governed by a minority government with an elaborated collaboration between two partners (1998-2006) or coalition governments (since 2006) it has been very easy to observe the degree of political control over policies. Issues that could not be settled among the parties through middle-level discussions were “lifted” to bargaining among the party leaders. More broadly, the party leadership monitors the policy process and intervenes at strategic steps of the policy process.

According to Article 112 of the constitution, the prime minister, as chairman of the Council of Ministers, is tasked with ensuring cooperation among the ministers, and with supervising the implementation of the government’s general policy. The members of the Council of Ministers are jointly responsible for the implementation of this policy. Each minister is responsible to the prime minister and is responsible for the conduct of affairs under his or her jurisdiction and the acts and activities of his or her subordinates. The prime minister ensures that the ministers exercise their functions in accordance with the constitution and the laws, and can take corrective measures to this end. Considering the provision of Article 109, under which the prime minister appoints ministers, his/her oversight power over ministerial proposals is evident. However, ministries have been able to exercise greater influence during the periods of coalition government. In order to prevent this, a special coordinating body composed of the ministers from the coalition parties sets the agenda for the cabinet meetings.

Cabinet meetings are rarely used for decision-making. The important question is whether legislative proposals from line departments are (a) accepted as presidential proposals; (b) permitted to be submitted as departmental (but not White House) proposals; or (c) blocked from being submitted to Congress. These decisions are made by the president’s top aides (i.e., the White House Staff) or by the president. Among White House Staff and departmental officials, the relationships of authority and relative access to the president vary considerably, even within one administration. These things depend on the president’s overall strategy and for a particular piece of legislation. The White House is basically sovereign vis-a-vis the line departments and agencies.

The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) can return items envisaged for the cabinet meeting on policy grounds. Due to the fact that the PMO coordinates draft making and arranges also the agenda for the cabinet sittings, it does not often occur that the PMO returns items. The rule is that line ministers can place items on the cabinet meeting agenda even against the wishes of the prime minister. The handling of conflicts can be delicate, especially in cases when the prime minister and the line minister represent different parties and perhaps differing political interests which need to be reconciled. Yet controversial items are often discussed in informal meetings beforehand. Especially the institutionalized unofficial meeting of the cabinet which is led by the prime minister (the iltakoulu, or evening session) has an important function in consensual decision-making. In any case, the position of the prime minister is not dominating. The position is a leadership position, but a leader among equals and decision-making must depart from the task of building consensus between colleagues. A model which gives the government office the right automatically to return items does not fit the Finnish political reality.

In the current Berlusconi government, the prime minister has acquired a much stronger leadership position. This has meant the PMO has the ability to return items, particularly when policy aspects conflict with the government’s strategic views. This is particularly evident on policy matters that are close to the prime minister’s own policy priorities. The PMO must obviously take into account the fact that the government is a coalition cabinet, and that the views of the different parties must be respected. Moreover, once the government program has been agreed upon and the main policy goals defined, line ministries are given a significant amount of policy discretion, which the PMO will typically respect.

In theory, the prime minister can of course reject policy proposals. There is some disagreement between experts if and how the prime minister uses this right. On the one hand, the current prime minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, overshadows the other members of government by his charisma and international recognition. This gives him a certain authority that, in these days of unaccustomed austerity, has proved essential for the cohesion, and perhaps even the survival, of the government coalition.
On the other hand the prime minister acts as a “primus inter pares” and it would seem that he is particularly reluctant to interfere in dossiers handled by ministries controlled by the coalition partner. Here too, technical expertise at the Office of the Prime Minister or the lack of it would seem to prevent the prime minister to become more active in the formulation of governmental policy. The arbitrage function is exerted if at all at the level of the numerous consultative bodies or interministerial organs and of course the Inspectorate General of Finance (Inspection générale des finances, IGF) affiliated to the budget ministry. That is where a genuine arbitrage role takes place, although limited most of the time to the financial or budgetary impact of policy measures.

Though the return of materials earmarked for cabinet meetings is not a frequent occurrence, the government office (Ministerio de la Presidencia) and the prime minister’s office are do have this power, applicable to all items on the basis of either formal or substantive considerations. The head of the government office (who is also the first deputy prime minister), which since 2004 has been Maria Teresa Fernández de la Vega, can reject initiatives in her position as chair of committee that prepares Council of Ministers meetings (the Comisión General de Subsecretarios y Secretarios de Estado). The powerful director of the PM’s Private Office, José Enrique Serrano, can also return items, but only de facto, taking advantage of his proximity to the prime minister. This is typically done through informal instructions to the sectoral department responsible for the item. Finally, the minister for economy and finance, who is responsible for coordination on economic matters and chairs an important specialized cabinet subcommittee (the Comisión Delegada del Gobierno para Asuntos Económicos), also has also the capacity to accept or return any item submitted by a ministry on economic policy or budgetary grounds. Initiatives subject to this evaluation and possible return for reconsideration include draft bills and even internal appointments.

The PMO is legally and de facto able to return materials on the basis of policy considerations. However, the importance assigned to this function fluctuates depending on the prime minister.
Last-minute revisions of draft bills by ministries can go unchecked, and provide distortions in the service of clientelistic and/or corrupt interests. More generally, the ability of the PMO to scrutinize draft legislation at any stage is very limited.
In the Karamanlis government, the cabinet used to meet infrequently, and there was a more lax attitude toward draft bills prepared by cabinet ministers, although of course the most important legislative proposals fell under the scrutiny of the prime minister’s advisors. In the Papandreou government, which has been functioning under a condition of acute fiscal crisis and is eager to decrease public expenditure associated with any new legislation, there is tighter supervision of items envisaged for the cabinet meeting on the basis of policy considerations.

Government office behavior remains largely unchanged with respect to the 2009 SGI report. The government office or PMO plays a key gatekeeping role, accentuated by the prime minister’s internal power. It exerts strong control over the agenda of the Council of Ministers, and can de facto return materials. However, this takes place on the basis of political considerations more often than on policy grounds.

In the Czech Republic, there is a well-established system for interministerial coordination. Draft bills or important policy proposals must be distributed for comments to the prime minister’s office, all ministries, the Czech National Bank and all other affected public institutions. This ensures that substantial discussion takes place, with comments available for all participants to see. The minister presenting material is obliged to make some response to all comments received. The prime minister’s office has no formal authority beyond that of any other participant in the discussion. The importance of the ministry level is confirmed by the fact that the focus of lobbying activities has shifted from the political arena to individual ministries.

Present guidelines for policy coordination, which were passed by the Japanese cabinet in 2000, hold the Cabinet Secretariat to be the highest and final organ for policy coordination below the cabinet itself. In statutory terms, the Cabinet Secretariat was thus placed above other ministries and national agencies. The empowerment of the Cabinet Secretariat has de jure enabled Japanese prime ministers to return items envisaged for cabinet meetings on policy grounds. In reality this rarely happens, as usually the only items to reach the cabinet stage are those on which consensus exists. However, this does not rule out conflicts over contentious policy issues among coalition partners, which can also flare up at the cabinet level. This has already been witnessed on a few occasions during the coalition government of the DPJ, the People’s New Party and the Social Democratic Party (between September 2009 and June 2010).

Given the nature of Dutch politics, which features a strong departmental culture and fragile coalition governments, the Ministry of General Affairs has little more to rely upon in carrying out its gatekeeping functions than the government policy accord (regeerakkoord).
Ministerial departments have considerable power in influencing the negotiations that take place during the elaborate process of preparing cabinet decisions. Each line ministry – that is, its minister or deputy minister – has a secretariat that serves as the administrative “front gate.” By the time an issue has been brought to the cabinet level, it has been thoroughly debated, framed and reframed as a consequence of the bureaucracy between the involved ministries. Gatekeeping in the Dutch system is one-directional; policy documents are moved from lower to higher administrative levels, and (almost) never the other way around, which results in a strong tendency toward interest stratification (Korsten et al., 2010, 62). In theory, the prime minister, through his representatives, could play a prominent role in coordinating this process. But given the limited scope of his monitoring capacities and staff, he can steer the course of events for only a fairly small number of issues, even when highly ambitious.
Nevertheless, the Balkenende IV government earnestly pursued new modes of interministerial coordination through its pilot projects, Governing with Programs (Regeren met programma’s). These projects were conceived as part of a larger program for National Government Renewal. The Balkenende IV government had two program ministers for urgent problems that reach across ministerial task areas: the first for Youth and Family Affairs; the second for Affairs of Housing, Residential Areas, and Integration.

The chancellor as head of government can informally return materials within his own party’s cabinet faction. The same can be said about the vice chancellor’s informal authority within his cabinet faction.

The Prime Minister’s Office may return policy proposals to the ministry which formulated the proposal. However, if this happens, it is for political and not legal reasons. A proposal is returned if it contains items that contradict the government agreement or the explicit policy position of one of the coalition partners. Policies are not returned for technical reasons. The process of returning a proposal can be seen as a policy-balancing instrument, particularly when prior balancing attempts, such as through interdepartmental coordination, have failed.
In contrast to the Prime Minister , the core group of party leaders within government can return all items on policy grounds. It also prepares cabinet meetings and in this sense serves the functions inquired about under “Cabinet Committees.”

The chancellery formally sets the agenda for cabinet meetings, which gives it some gatekeeping power. Political power, however, depends on other resources. The content of the cabinet’s agenda is negotiated between the coalition partners in advance, and on policy matters the cabinet simply certifies what has been decided previously by the party politicians. Thus, only in exceptional cases will the government office refuse items scheduled for the cabinet meeting on the basis of policy considerations.

The Government Office has the formal power to return draft laws on policy grounds. In practice, however, the gatekeeping role of the Government Office is of limited importance since most legislative projects are discussed beforehand in the coalition council and undergo a complex process of interministerial coordination. Prime Minister Fico pursued an informal and personalistic style of governing and did not make much use of the Government Office’s formal competencies.

There is no prime minister. The Federal Chancellery manages and prepares the agenda of the Federal Council, and can return items and postpone political issues due to lack of coherence with other policies.