This chapter seeks to add an important empirical dimension to the study of coalition and executive politics. In particular, it deals with the value of executive offices in coalition formation and governance and thus contributes to the evaluation of theories of portfolio allocation (Laver and Shepsle 1996) and governing in coalitions (Martin and Vanberg 2011). The key contribution of this article is the following: Empirical and formal scholarship dealing with the allocation of portfolios has made invaluable contributions to our understanding of the motivations for parties to join governments, but it has generally not considered ministerial organization below the cabinet level. Due to the limited cross-fertilization between formal coalition theories and academic scholarship on ministerial organization, coalition theories have remained unspecific about the precise nature of the ‘prize’ parties are believed to pursue when entering government. At the same time, students of public administration have done little to build on recent advances in formal coalition theories to study the strategic context of administrative change.

Our contribution builds on such work but ultimately seeks to constitute a first step towards a closer marriage of these distinctive traditions of research. The focus of the present piece is empirical. We will go beyond previous work on portfolio allocation by studying variations in the organization of government departments across a sample of German regional state governments during the past two decades and demonstrate that these variations below the cabinet level are too significant to be ignored in empirical studies of portfolio allocation. While we do not wish to generalize too strongly from our sample, our main conclusion – namely that meaningful assessments of the ‘value’ of ministries in bargaining over government formation require more accurate empirical information on the actual jurisdictions behind the names of ministries than has been used by scholars of coalition politics in the past – is clearly in line with empirical work on ministerial organization in other countries (e.g., Pollitt 1983; Rose 1987).