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- Coalition governance in presidential systemsPublication . Alberdingk Thijm, Joris; Fernandes, Jorge Miguel Alves; Malamud, AndresCoalitions are the most common form of government in presidential systems, and the burgeoning litera ture on the topic has recently shifted its focus from the formation and termination stages to the governance stage of the coalition life cycle. However, this literature often adopts a narrow view of delegation, treat ing the president as the coalition’s sole principal, and has focused mainly on the role of presidents in monitoring coalition partners. Political parties have been overlooked. Furthermore, research on coalition governance under presidentialism remains limited to Brazil. As such, this thesis sets out to address the following question: do coalition parties in presidential systems “shadow” one another with an eye on reducing agency loss, that is, do they appoint junior ministers or committee chairs to (committees over seeing) portfolios controlled by another party or the president? To address this question, this thesis makes three contributions. First, it proposes an alternative conceptual framework for coalition governance in presidential systems: the presidential compromise model, which conceives of the president and parties collectively forming a principal that delegates authority to the coalition’s members. Second and third, it looks at the conditions under which political parties employ junior ministers and committee chairs to shadow their coalition partners. Using an original data set covering 31 cabinets in nine multiparty presi dential democracies in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, this thesis finds that shadowing is a function of the degree of agency loss the coalition expects to a specific portfolio and of institutional learning. Specif ically, it finds that the shadowing of nonpartisan ministers is positively affected by presidential powers and democratic experience, while committee shadowing is a function of ideological distance, portfolio salience and committee powers. These results suggest that parties strategically employ junior ministers and committee chairs to curb delegation perils and implement their collective policy agenda.