Coalition Governments, Divided Governments, and Electoral Theory

In: Governance: an international journal of policy and administration, Band 4, Heft 3, S. 236-249

Abstract

For decades theorizing about party competition in two‐party and multiparty democracies has proceeded along separate tracks. The former has assumed an idealized world in which one party wins full control of a system's governing institutions in a first‐past‐the‐post election, while the latter posits a world in which elections conducted under a system of proportional representation split control of the parliament among the parties. The contemporary American experience with divided government suggests that the two lines of theorizing greatly exaggerate the differences between two‐party and multi‐party systems. Where a two‐party system has a separation of powers based on independent elections, coalition governments involving shared control of the separate institutions may result. Under such conditions rational voting may be just as demanding in two‐party systems as in multi‐party systems, and the policy outputs of two‐party systems may be no more coherent than the outputs of multi‐party systems, contrary to traditional arguments.