Government, Coalition

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A coalition government exists when two or more political parties formally agree to share executive responsibility and cabinet posts. Proportional representation systems common among parliamentary democracies often produce election results in which no single party wins an absolute majority of seats in a legislature. Such situations yield incentives for parties to build alliances in order to form a new government; absent the emergence of a coalition, the country is left either with leadership that does not command majority support or with the necessity of calling new elections. In political systems that encourage government by coalition, votes do not directly determine the composition of a new government; rather, they only determine which political parties will sit in parliament. Once that initial issue is settled, elected representatives and party leaders negotiate from among a potentially huge number of party combinations and permutations in search of a winning majority. Postelection coalition building can take days, weeks, and even months to complete, with the result being capture by one party of the premiership and distribution across coalition members of important posts such as foreign affairs, finance, justice, and the like. Coalition government stands as an alternative model to majoritarian governance, the latter being characterized by winner-take-all “first-past-the-post” electoral systems that favor clear distinctions between winners and losers.

Coalition government is the subject of a voluminous literature within the political science discipline. As a system of governance, the multiparty coalition is studied most frequently in European democracies whose electoral rules provide for even a modicum of proportionality. Italy’s penchant for short-lived postwar coalition governments is notorious, as is Belgium’s complex process of managing a delicate linguistic divide through coalitions. The reluctance of postwar German electorates to grant power exclusively to a single party has meant that coalition government—sometimes matching the country’s two largest parties in the same “grand coalition”—has been the norm there. Beyond Europe, coalition government is a standard expectation of democratic process in such countries as Israel, India, and Japan.

Advocates of coalition government tout the model’s ability to forge compromise and cooperation, and they point to greater inclusiveness as an additional virtue. Political parties in coalitional systems are competitive, but the prospect of governing with one’s competitors after an election can moderate campaign rhetoric. Granting new or untested parties a share of executive power as junior coalition partners may likewise moderate political extremism. According to supporters of this institutional approach to democratic governance, policies emerging from multiparty coalition governments should have a better chance of societal acceptance and successful implementation because they are the products of compromise rather than the imposition of political will by a lone dominant party.

Detractors claim that coalition governments are prone to weakness and instability, and because they can blur lines of accountability their democratic credentials are sometimes called into question. Opponents also object to the possibility of governments that are little more than “coalitions of losers,” marked by parties and adversaries whose electoral scores have just dropped precipitously but who nonetheless join forces to cling to power and forestall their mutual demise.

SEE ALSO Elections; First-past-the-post; Government; Parliaments and Parliamentary Systems; Plurality; Winner-Take-All Society

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dodd, Lawrence C. 1976. Coalitions in Parliamentary Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Downs, William M. 1998. Coalition Government, Subnational Style: Multiparty Politics in Europe’s Regional Parliaments. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Mershon, Carol. 2002. Costs of Coalition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Müller, Wolfgang C. and Kaare Strøm, eds. 2000. Coalition Governments in Western Europe. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

William M. Downs