Small in Size but Powerful in Parliament? The Legislative Performance of Minority Governments

Abstract

Minority cabinets do not control a legislative majority and are thus vulnerable to parliamentary defeat. Consequently, the legislative performance of minority cabinets has been often brought into question. In this article, I argue that minority cabinets do not perform generally worse than majority cabinets. I hypothesize that only substantive minority cabinets which do not enjoy formal majority support by noncabinet parties work significantly worse than majority ones. The empirical analysis is based on a large new dataset that combines original information on minority‐cabinet attributes and legislative data for 197 governments in 21 parliamentary democracies since the 1980s. The results of a fractional logit analysis support my theoretical expectations and show that not all types of minority cabinets perform worse than majority governments. My findings provide a comparative insight into the functioning of minority governments and have important implications for our understanding of legislative politics, party competition, and policymaking.

Support Party Strategies on Important Policy Issues: Results from Swedish Minority Governments

“…The more important an issue is to an ideologically distant support party, the less likely it is that the minority government can count on its support. However, since plenary voting is a mirror of preceding bargaining (see Christiansen 2008), the opposing behaviour of ideologically distant support parties on their core issues only reflects conflict issues that still gained a majority (see Matthieß 2019; Thürk 2021). Support parties' agreement rate on the government's core issues is 72.7%, indicating that support parties are a reliable support.…”

“…The parliament only votes electronically on an MP's request or when a counter-proposal has been submitted, which means that these legislative issues bear a higher level of conflict. Moreover, parliamentary voting reflects the legislative performance of minority governments, since proposals are only forwarded if plenary support is secured (Matthieß 2019; Thürk 2021).…”

“…The voting data has been hand-coded from plenary reports from 1991–2002 and partly drawn from the Swedish Riksdag's online service from 2003–2018 (Sveriges Riksdag 2002–2018). Lastly, it is important to consider that support parties are not expected to vote without informing the government about their plans since such behaviour would alienate future cooperation and pay-offs (Thürk 2021: 9).…”

“…Such a support agreement ‘is negotiated prior to the formation of the government, and … takes the form of an explicit, comprehensive, and more than short-term commitment to the policies as well as the survival of the government’ (Strøm 1984: 204). Support parties are thus often essential for the minority government's stability (Christiansen and Pedersen 2014; Krauss and Thürk 2021; Thürk 2021). However, there is a trade-off for minority government support: the support party receives pay-offs in the form of policy concessions – and sometimes even has personnel participating in the administration – and in turn officially commits to support the minority government (Anghel and Thürk 2021; Bale and Dann 2002; Christiansen and Damgaard 2008; Christiansen and Seeberg 2016).…”

Regierung und Regierungsbildung

“…Sie können sich also für jedes Gesetzesvorhaben Unterstützung im Parlament suchen oder sie entscheiden sich dazu, mit einer oder mehreren Parteien langfristige Partnerschaften einzugehen (Strøm 1990). Zuletzt haben Analysen gezeigt, dass Minderheitsregierungen genauso stabil (Krauss/Thürk 2021) und genauso effektiv (Thürk 2021) sein können wie Mehrheitsregierungen, vor allem dann, wenn sie auf langfristige Partnerschaften mit anderen Parteien im Parlament setzen. Solche Konstellationen werden häufig auch als versteckte Mehrheitsregierungen bezeichnet (Strøm 1990).…”