Minority Coalition Governance in Comparative Perspective

The study of coalition governance concerns how political parties manage to govern together and resolve conflicts. Bale and Bergman (2006) showed for the cases of Sweden and New Zealand how support agreements established ‘contract parliamentarism’ with agreements on procedures and policy contents that somewhat resembles that of coalition agreements. Christiansen and Pedersen (2014) found for the Danish case how a ‘formal’ minority government for most of its policies from its coalition agreements passed with a support, and how this resembled majority governments more than substantive majority governments. Thürk (2019) argues that minority governments with support parties tend to survive longer and have more policy success. The aim of this paper is to expand the ideas from these contributions comparatively and study a) the role of coalition agreement during minority government, and b) its relation to support party arrangements. The theoretical expectation is that support parties are particularly important for passing the content of coalition agreements for formal minority governments while also providing rallying points for opposition parties. In return, the minority government may pass policies not mentioned in coalition agreement. This could be called a log roll strategy. A substantive minority government will have to find compromise or more often abandon more of its proposed policies covered in its coalition agreement. This strategy could be called a compromise strategy. The paper will seek to compare the performance of these types of minority governments for Denmark, Sweden, and Great Britain.