Multiparty Governments Research Articles

Authoritarian multiparty governments

ABSTRACT In 2020, almost 50% of dictatorships included multiple parties in their government. Existing research has not studied this systematically, and generally considers granting outsiders access to ministerial cabinets a risky and costly strategy. This article provides evidence of authoritarian multiparty governments (AMGs) being a global and increasingly common phenomena. We argue that AMGs are a power-sharing strategy whereby autocrats co-opt outsiders through cabinet appointments to divide the opposition and consolidate their rule. Using individual-level data on ministers' partisan affiliation in autocracies worldwide, we show that AMGs positively correlate with ethnic divides, civil war, and “democratic” institutions, and we use new measures of power sharing to demonstrate that coalition partners often exert a real influence through their ministerial mandates. Our findings suggest that AMG is an overlooked survival strategy for autocrats and highlight the need to focus more on the organization and composition of the political executive in autocracies.

GOVERNMENT COALITION PARTIES' INTEREST CONFLICT AND THEIR ETHICS BASED ON SURAH AL-MUMTAHANAH

A multi-party system of governance, which is based on idiosyncratically and culturally diverse identities, is so prone to disintegration that it will erode public trust. Government confidence and authority declined as a result of problems that emerged as government coalitions were formed. The most notable of these included the rejection of influence, the politicization of the law, the arrogance of officials, the repudiation of offices, and the accumulation of wealth in unwarranted ways. The author's motivation to solve the formula problem, "What is the ethics of coalition multi-party government from the perspective of the Quran's interpretation of Surah Al-Mumtahanah verses eight and nine?" stems from the aforementioned issue. Descriptive and qualitative analysis research on the ethical normative analysis conducted in the Republic of Indonesia's cabinet between 2019 and 2024 is associated with the principles of Quranic ethics, which call for cooperation. The novel observation made by the author is that the coalition is a close-knit political organization that does not marginalize friends and instead stands tall and sits low, unlike a two-legged, power-sharing political party. Coalitions also foster cooperation, which advances mankind, fosters justice, and unites people.

Coalition policy in multiparty governments: whose preferences prevail

AbstractIn coalition governments, parties need to agree on a common policy position. Whose preferences prevail? The proportionality hypothesis, the idea that coalition partners’ influence on policy is proportional to their share of seats, has been used widely in the literature on democratic representation, ideological congruence, and coalition politics. In my analysis of competing theories aimed at determining what influences policy compromise in multiparty governments, I reject the proportionality hypothesis. My results suggest instead that coalition partners exert equal influence on policy compromises, independent of their number of seats. More extensive analysis also provides evidence for increased party influence on policies when the party is the formateur or closer to the parliamentary median, ceteris paribus. As a by-product of my analysis, I provide a simple and better proxy for measuring a government's position when this position is not directly observable.

Colleagues or adversaries: Ministerial coordination across party lines

AbstractIn multiparty governments, policymaking is a collaborative effort among the different incumbent parties. Often hidden by public debates about broader government policy, the necessary coordination routinely happens at the ministerial level, where ministries of different parties jointly devise viable and equitable policy solutions. However, since coordination involves substantial transaction costs, governments must carefully gauge the potential benefits. We study the political rationales that motivate governments to make this investment. We argue that coordination during the process of ministerial policy design hinges on both a conducive ministerial structure and sufficient authority. Once these conditions are met, cross‐party coordination is more likely in policy areas where the implementation of government policy cannot be taken for granted. We investigate these claims, drawing on two new datasets. The first contains information about ministerial collaborations on all legislative projects sponsored by German governments, while the second maps the distribution of policy responsibilities among German ministries from 1976 until 2013, based on data about the policy briefs of all individual working units within the top‐level federal executive. Given that ministries imprint their own perspective on legislation, our results are beyond administrative pedantries, but have substantial implications for the type and content of policies coalition governments formulate.

Question of Timing: Pre-Electoral Coalitions in Multiparty Presidential Regimes

This paper focuses on the timing of coalition formation under presidential systems. While elections in parliamentary regimes have recently been characterized by a high degree of uncertainty both in the results and the formation of cabinets, this is not the case for presidential politics. As a result, we argue that coalition cycles differ across systems of government. As a matter of fact, we argue that the process of coalition formation under presidentialism is more complicated. To test our claim, we look at forty-four multiparty governments in Latin America and Asia. We find that presidentialism — with its fixed mandate and its specific institutional mechanism for selecting the president — directly affects the ‘coalition life cycle’ and fosters a stronger propensity to pre-electoral agreements.

Coalition agreements and governments’ policy-making productivity

One of the biggest challenges parties in multiparty governments face is making policies together and overcoming the risk of a policy stalemate. Scholars have devoted much attention to the study of how various institutions in cabinet and parliament help coalition parties with conflicting policy preferences to be efficient in the policy-making process. Coalition agreements are one of many instruments coalition partners can use to facilitate policy making. However, many scholars describe such agreements’ actual role as cheap talk, due to their legally non-enforceable nature. Do coalition agreements make a difference in the policy-making productivity of multiparty governments? To address this question, this article focuses on governments’ policy output and investigates whether coalition agreements increase the policy-making productivity of multiparty cabinets. Its central argument is that written agreements between coalition partners strengthen the capacity of coalition governments to make policy reforms, even when there is a high degree of ideological conflict among partners. To evaluate this argument, the article analyzes data on economic reform measures adopted by national governments in 11 Western European countries over a 40-year period (1978–2017), based on a coding of more than 1000 periodical country reports issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The results show that while coalition agreements foster policy productivity in minimal winning cabinets, they play a weaker role in minority and surplus governments. Coalition agreements limit the negative effect of intra-cabinet ideological conflict on reform productivity, suggesting that such contracts help parties overcome the risk of policy stalemate.

Conditional satisfaction: political support, congruence, and cabinet composition

ABSTRACT This paper examines the relationship between citizen satisfaction with the functioning of democracy and ideological congruence. We focus on how this relationship may vary by government type, paying attention to the conditioning effects of coalition governments’ ideological make-up and individual-level education. Our analyses rely on harmonized survey data covering one million respondents in 28 countries over a 40-year period. We find limited evidence that the relationship between citizen satisfaction and ideological congruence is conditional on national government type. All coalitions are not, however, created equal. Comparing single-party governments to multi-party governments with different ideological compositions, we find striking differences, but only for the higher educated. While the negative relationship between citizen satisfaction and ideological incongruence is similar for lower-educated citizens in single-party and multi-party coalition settings (irrespective of cabinet composition), for the higher educated, the relationship weakens as a function of the ideological diversity of the coalition cabinet.

Party campaign statements and portfolio allocation in coalition governments

Which party controls which cabinet posts is an important determinant of how multi-party governments work. Existing research shows that parties’ attention to policy domains in election manifestos is a key predictor of portfolio allocation. However, election manifestos are broad documents and typically published months before an election. This research note argues that policy emphasis in the last few weeks before the election matters for portfolio allocation, because parties can focus their message, react to exogenous events and use campaign communication as a commitment device. A test of this argument makes use of a novel dataset on party representatives’ campaign statements. The findings show that the policy focus of campaign statements, especially those stating positions rather than referring to valence, predicts who will control a ministerial portfolio associated with the respective policy domain.

Preferences for single-party versus multi-party governments

The literature on comparative political institutions highlights a tradeoff between majoritarian/plurality and proportional/consensus models of democracy. The former arrangement is said to enhance having governing parties held accountable. The latter is said to promote representation of a range of views, with a coalition of multiple parties governing. A tradeoff may be that the representativeness of multi-party coalitions can make it difficult for voters to hold government accountable, while single-party governments that facilitate accountability might fail to represent a range of parties in government. The ability of voters to respond to such differences is, however, subject to some skepticism given that the public opinion literature finds serious limits on a person’s ability to know basic facts about political institutions, let alone have preferences for governments that reflect democratic norms of accountability and representativeness. We assess public preferences for single versus multi-party governments and find evidence of systematic preferences that suggests people may link democratic norms of accountability and representativeness to the governmental system that promotes the respective norm. Preferences are also associated with the party system that people are familiar with.

Cabinet Governance in New Zealand under MMP: Multi–Party Government and Condoned Dissent

Cabinet Governance in New Zealand under MMP: Multi–Party Government and Condoned Dissent

Populist conceptions of the “people” and multi-party democracy

Although conceptual approaches to populism differ, there is a high degree of consensus that the ideological distinctiveness of populism lies in the unique way it constructs its core concept, the “people”. This article assesses the implications of populist understandings of the people for the constitutional endorsement of multi-party representative democracy. Regardless of its many manifestations, populism structures peoplehood around a distinct brand of ideologised popular sovereignty, in combination with another dominant host ideology, which, depending on the context, can be drawn from any of the main ideologies on the left‒right spectrum. This combination invariably produces an opposite “other”, an “anti-people”, as a necessary co-constituent of the populist people’s cohesion and identity. The homogenising and exclusionary construct of peoplehood associated with populism holds profound implications for multi-party representative government. It challenges the pluralist notion of multi-party representation by advocating for representation as the embodiment of a homogenous popular will instead. Representation as embodiment fosters extreme majoritarian attitudes and, as histories of populists-in-government have shown, tendencies towards authoritarianism. Populist conceptions of the people ultimately dispute core features of multi-party representative democracy, such as inclusive democratic citizenship, pluralist representation, oppositional political rights, the recognition of opposition parties as standing alternatives to incumbent governments, and accommodation and compromise as inclusionary democratic practice.

Circumventing coalition oversight in multiparty governments: Bill referral to parliamentary committees in the Finnish Eduskunta

Existing research largely agrees that to minimize ministerial drift, political parties in multiparty governments tend to use parliamentary committees to monitor each other. Particularly, they strive to chair parliamentary committees corresponding to ministerial departments to keep tabs on their ruling partners. Yet, policing ministerial activities through a chair-based monitoring system requires perfect correspondence of jurisdictions between ministries and committees. We suggest that when perfect correspondence is absent, ministerial parties may strategically circumvent committee oversight. Specifically, motivated by policy preference divergence with the coalition partner, ministers can draft proposals to make their referral to a friendlier committee more likely than referral to a hostile watchdog committee chaired by the partner. Our analysis of committee referrals of over 2800 ministerial proposals from the Finnish Eduskunta (2001–2015) confirms this expectation. The results, therefore, bring important new insights to our understanding of parliamentary scrutiny and partner oversight under coalition governments.

Incumbents Beware: The Impact of Offshoring on Elections

How does globalization affect politics? One of the most controversial aspects of globalization is offshoring, when manufacturing operations and business functions move abroad. Although voters generally dislike offshoring, it remains unclear how moving jobs abroad impacts democratic elections. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, the author finds that incumbent government parties lose more votes in municipalities where a local plant moved production abroad between elections than in municipalities that did not experience such an event. The result holds across various time periods, different incumbent parties and diverse types of elections. In both national and regional elections, voters punish incumbent government parties when a local firm moves production abroad. Incumbent parties' vote shares fall as the number of jobs lost due to offshoring increases. In multiparty governments, voters disproportionately punish the largest coalition party for offshoring. The results of an original survey administered in Spain verify the importance of offshoring for voters' retrospective evaluations of incumbents.

The agenda power of non-legislative tools

ABSTRACT How do we assess the power of governments to control and set the agenda in parliaments? How do we assess the power of oppositions to present their agenda? Cox and McCubbins’ cartel model used a roll rate analysis of legislation, while Krehbiel suggested the use of non-legislative tools. Based on this advice, this article investigates the use of a non-legislative tool – motions for the agenda – in the Israeli Knesset, or more specifically: ‘the agenda power of non-legislative tools’ defined as the ability to block or significantly delay motions from reaching a debate in committee. Using data from the Knesset, in which the opposition operates in a parliamentary system with multiparty coalition governments, it demonstrates that opposition legislators utilise these non-legislative tools more extensively than coalition members to wield their agenda power. The findings support the addition of this tool to the cartel model.

The rise of authoritarian multiparty governments

While multiparty government is associated with democracy, we use a new dataset to show that autocracies increasingly include multiple parties in government: In 2016, almost 50% of dictatorships did so. This is puzzling because the literature assumes that there is one ruling party, and considers granting outsiders access to government a risky and costly strategy. We argue that authoritarian multiparty government (AMG) emerges when the autocrat must coopt outsiders to prevent a unified opposition from arising. Existing research would suggest that most AMGs are arrangements where multiple parties are included in the cabinet, but only the ruler’s party matters. However, we demonstrate that coalition partners often have real influence, and that AMGs positively correlate with social divides, civil war and “democratic” institutions. Results suggest that AMG is an overlooked survival strategy, and highlight the need to adopt a broader perspective on parties – rather than the party – in dictatorships.

What You See Is Not Always What You Get: Bargaining before an Audience under Multiparty Government

AbstractParty elites in coalition governments are acutely aware that the deals they strike will be critically evaluated by their supporters, and that they risk losing support if they are perceived as ineffective negotiators. This has a powerful influence on the bargains parties strike. Because most supporters are unaware of the complex aspects of bargains and instead rely on simple heuristics to evaluate their most visible features, parties have incentives to meet supporter expectations primarily on easily observable outcomes. To do so, they make trade-offs on less observable outcomes. This implies that the more visible features of a bargain typically do not accurately reflect the relative success of parties in coalition negotiations. We evaluate our argument using original data on the office rewards and policy risks of portfolio allocation in 16 parliamentary democracies. Our findings support our argument, and they have important implications for the nature of representation under multiparty government.

IDEAL COMBINATIONS OF GOVERNMENT SYSTEM AND PARTY SYSTEM FOR STABILITY AND EFFECTIVENESS OF THE GOVERNMENT

Indonesia since before independence until the time the core adopted a multi-party system. While the system of government changes, from a presidential, parliamentary, quasi presidential system. Multiparty presidential government systems can disrupt the stability and effectiveness of the government because there must be a coalition of political parties in the government, the preparation of the cabinet by the President must consider and accommodate the interests of coalition political parties, decision making or policy-making must also consider the interests of coalition political parties, so it will require longer time. The coalition of political parties is very fluid and pragmatic, so there may be a change in the coalition because there is a possibility that political parties that were outside the coalition will then enter the government coalition, and vice versa. Exit the entry of political parties in the government coalition will certainly be very disturbing, because political parties who have just joined the government will demand a seat in the government, especially in the cabinet. Unloading pairs of the cabinet or dismantling pairs of government seats will often occur. This of course greatly disrupts the stability and effectiveness of government. Therefore, a presidential government system ideally does not combine with a multi-party system. A change from a multi-party system to a simple multi-party system is needed, or if possible with a two-party system.

When ideological lenses crack. The joint effect of the Great Recession and clarity of government responsibility on economic assessments

Recent studies have found that ideology has less influence on economic evaluations in tough economic times. This article addresses whether this influence is equally constrained by clarity of government responsibility. With a macro-analysis spanning 2004 to 2015 in the EU-15, it demonstrates that differences in economic assessments between ideological groups are less pronounced in countries with blurred responsibility. Also shedding light on how the economic and political environments interplay, it evidences that as the economy deteriorates, ideological differences in economic assessments tend to decrease in countries with single-party governments (i.e., high-clarity situations), while they remain steady in multi-party governments (low-clarity situations). This article concludes by suggesting that the effect of economic downturns on ideological conditioning can be dampened by the political context.

Economic voting in Turkey: single- vs. multi-party governments

ABSTRACT This study investigates the strength of economic voting in Turkey under various types of governments. A vote equation developed for this purpose, which takes into account all of the key factors mentioned in the economic voting literature, shows that voters hold coalition governments less responsible for their economic performance than single-party governments and minor partners of a coalition government less responsible than its major member. These gaps widen as political fragmentation of the government increases. In governments involving many parties and parties with significantly different ideologies, some of the junior coalition members benefit rather than suffer from a bad economy.

Coalition Government, Legislative Institutions, and Public Policy in Parliamentary Democracies

AbstractMost democracies are governed by coalitions, comprising multiple political parties with conflicting policy positions. The prevalence of these governments poses a significant question: Which parties' electoral commitments are ultimately reflected in government policy? Recent theories have challenged our understanding of multiparty government, arguing that the relative influence of coalition parties depends crucially on institutional context. Specifically, where institutions allow credible enforcement of bargains, policy should reflect a compromise among all governing parties; where such institutions are absent, the preferences of parties controlling the relevant ministries should prevail. Critically, empirical work has thus far failed to provide direct evidence for this conditional relationship. Analyzing changes in social protection policies in 15 parliamentary democracies, we provide the first systematic evidence that the strength of legislative institutions significantly shapes the relative policy influence of coalition parties. Our findings have implications for our understanding of coalition government, policymaking, and electoral responsiveness.