Successful institutional reform requires a coalition that is broader than the reform's natural advocates and more durable than the crisis that created the opportunity for reform.
Why Coalitions Determine Outcomes
The political economy of institutional reform is ultimately a story about coalition building: which actors can be persuaded to support reform, what they need to receive in exchange for their support, and whether the coalition can be maintained through the implementation phase as well as the enactment phase. The coalition that successfully enacts a reform is not always the coalition that is willing to defend the reform against the reversal efforts that follow enactment — and the gap between the enactment coalition and the defence coalition is where many reforms fail.
The coalition architecture that produces durable reform typically includes the natural advocates for the reform, who provide the energy and the public voice; the institutional actors who will implement the reform, whose buy-in is necessary for faithful implementation; the actors who benefit from the reform's effects even if they are not its natural constituency, who provide the breadth that makes the coalition politically durable; and the institutional actors who could block the reform and who must be given enough in the coalition negotiation to not use their blocking power. Each of these coalition members has a different motivation and a different claim on the reform's content — and the coalition architecture must accommodate enough of each to maintain their participation without undermining the reform's substantive core.
Coalition architecture for reform is the most neglected dimension of reform strategy. The reformer who has the policy right but the coalition wrong will produce a reform that is blocked, gutted, or reversed. The reformer who has the coalition right can often succeed with a policy that is imperfect, because the coalition's durability protects the reform's implementation and shields it from the reversal efforts that would otherwise succeed.
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