The rationale for coalition government

Abstract

Government by a coalition of political parties, rather than by a single party having a parliamentary majority, looks like a recipe for indecisive management and fuzzy policymaking. Every decision has to be teased out in complex negotiations between parties having different priorities and motivated to compete with each other as well as to co-operate. The formation of a cabinet will take place at one remove from the electorate. When, by contrast, a single party is in charge of the nation’s affairs, the will of the electorate will be expressed in clear legislation originating from a single accountable command structure. The politics of Weimar Germany, of France under the Fourth Republic (1946-58) and of Italy between the end of the Second World War and the early 1990s demonstrate the instability and inefficiency of coalition government, whereas politics in the United Kingdom (for example) show how a single party in power between general elections is able to act decisively and fulfill the mandate given to it by the electorate in the shape of desired and effective legislation. Electoral systems tending to promote competition between two major parties (especially first-past-the-post in single-member districts) are preferable to systems of proportional representation that favor party fragmentation and coalition government. That, at least, is one way of looking at things. An alternative opinion would see coalitiongovernment in a more benign light and take a jaundiced view of single party government. First of all, single party governments achieved through first-past-the-post elections are rarely based on a majority of votes cast. All governments elected in the United Kingdom since the Second World War were backed by less than 50 percent of voters.1 Given an electoral turnout roughly averaging 70 percent, this means that governments are always based on exiguous electoral support. The best way of avoiding this is to install proportional representation, whose outcome is likely to be the election of several sizeable parties, none of which will have a parliamentary majority. Each, however, will enjoy the support of discrete sections of the electorate, whose aspirations will be reflected in the respective parliamentary representation of each party. A multi-party parliament will commonly mean coalition government, but that need not bedecried. Both the process of cabinet formation, and that of inter-party policy negotiation, will involve the making of political deals. But that, after all, is the stuff of democratic politics andthere is nothing wrong with it. Indeed, it has the advantage that issues will be thoroughly thrashed out and agreed, rather than unilaterally decided by the leader of a single government party and a coterie of advisers. In the United Kingdom some prime ministers, such as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, have been seen as “presidential,” in this sense. This has led to dubious decision making, as with the introduction of the poll tax by the former and participation in the invasion of Iraq by the latter. Had there been coalition government at the time, those policy errors might have been avoided. Today, even within the United Kingdom, coalition government is becoming acceptable. Since the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh assembly in 1999, the previous Scottish Government and the present Welsh Government have been based on coalitions of parties. To evaluate these two contrary sets of arguments we need to place them in a broader con-text. Strong leadership is no doubt a desirable government characteristic, but so is a willingness to take into account different opinions and interests. The question is where the balance should be struck, and this depends on different political circumstances. Neither single party government nor government by coalition is innately superior: they are different ways of organizing the business of statecraft, and both involve trade-offs, though of contrasting kinds. Again, both single party and coalition arrangements come in different varieties. For instance,British politics since 1945 has experienced no less than seven changes of government, from the Labour Party to the Conservative Party and vice versa. In Japan, by contrast, between 1955 and 1993 Japan was ruled continuously by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which remained dominant (after nine months out of office) between 1994 and 2009. Coalition governments are similarly diverse in character. It is to a summary enumeration of this diversity that we now turn.2