Minority Government - Coalitions and Alliances

Coalitions and Alliances

To deal with situations where no clear majorities appear, parties either form coalition governments, alliances or agreements with other parties to stay in office.

A common situation is governance with "jumping majorities", i.e. that the cabinet stays as long as it can negotiate support from the parliament—majorities which well may be differently formed from issue to issue, from bill to bill.

An alternative arrangement is a looser alliance of parties, exemplified with Sweden. There the long governing Social Democrats have governed with more or less formal support from other parties: in the mid-20th century from Agrarians, after 1968 from Communists, and more recently from Greens and ex-Communists, and have thus been able to retain executive power and (in practice) legislative initiative. This is also common in Canada, where nine elections from 1921 to 2005 effectively produced minority federal governments: the parties can rarely cooperate enough to form a coalition, but will have loose agreements instead.

Occasionally a confidence and supply agreement may be formed. This is more formal pact which still falls short of creating a coalition government. In the Canadian province of Ontario, the Liberal Party formed a minority government from 1985 to 1987 on the basis of a formal accord with the New Democratic Party (NDP): the NDP agreed to support the Liberals for two years on all confidence motions and budgetary legislation, in exchange for the passage of certain legislative measures proposed by the NDP. This was not a coalition government, as the NDP remained an opposition party and was not given seats in the cabinet. In this case the Liberals did not even have a plurality of seats: they had 48 and the NDP had 25, but the Progressive Conservatives were the largest party with 52.

New Zealand's 48th Parliament operated with both a coalition and a looser agreement: the government was a coalition between the Labour Party and the Progressives, while United Future and New Zealand First had an agreement to support the government on confidence matters, while the Green Party abstained.