Arguments are presented for and against a series of hypotheses about the influence of the parliamentary party system on the stability of governments, and the hypotheses are tested against data on 196 governments in parliamentary democracies since 1945. A strong relation is found between the duration of governments and the fragmentation of the parliamentary party system and of the government parties, but the fragmentation of the opposition parties seems not to affect stability. One-party governments are more stable than coalition governments, and majority governments more than minority governments. The ideological dispersion of the parties—in the whole parliament, in the government, or in the opposition—does not explain stability any better than fragmentation, which is based upon only the number and sizes of parties; but the proportion of seats held by ‘anti-system’ parties (communists and neo-fascists, mainly) is a good indicator of stability. The best explanation of government stability found here is the combined linear influence of the size of the anti-system parties and the fragmentation of the pro-system parties.
All the theories of coalition formation known to us incorporate an assumption (or a set of assumptions which imply) that coalitions which are formed must at least be ‘winning’. 1 In the present context, a coalition is said to be winning if the sum of the seats held by its members is at least a simple majority of all the seats in the parliament. Most of these theories were intended to apply to government coalitions: indeed, several of them were specifically designed for this situation. Yet out of the total of 207 governments which have formed in twelve western democracies since the war, 2 seventy-four of them have not been winning.
Traditional theories of government coalition formation concentrate on formal criteria inspired by – if not directly drawn from – game theory. One such criterion is that the coalition which forms must be winning; another is that it should have no surplus members without whom it would still be winning, i.e. it should be minimal; and a third is that the number of parties should be as few as possible. The closest that such theories come to considering the substantive issues affecting the formation of coalitions in the real world is their focus on reducing the ideological diversity of parties within the government. On many occasions, however, such ideological considerations receive negligible attention from politicians, who often ignore size factors altogether.
Neo-functionalism ascribes a dynamic role to interest groups in the process of integrating pluralist communities. By participating in the policymaking process, interest groups are expected to develop a stake in promoting further integration in order to acquire economic payoffs and additional benefits from maintaining and stimulating the organization through which certain demands can be articulated and goals attained. This implies that in the integration process interest groups have an instrumental role to play in the maintenance of the system; and that by virtue of their participation in the policy-making process of an integrating community they will “learn” about the rewards of such involvement and undergo attitudinal changes inclining them favorably towards the system. Thus, they acquire an interest in seeing the system's perpetuation, and the policy and decision makers acquire an interest in being responsive to interest groups' demands. What is implied overall is that actors' loyalties will shift towards those decision makers in the systems best able to reward them.
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