Proportional representation is often viewed as being more democratic than majoritarian electoral systems because it can prevent parties with less than 50% of public support from dominating a parliament. Yet as David Willumsen and Simon Otjes demonstrate, the nature of coalition building means that policies supported by a minority are frequently voted into law under proportional representation systems.
At the start of July, a new Dutch coalition government was installed. For the first time in 20 years, this government has a minister explicitly responsible for fisheries. This symbolic but costly name change (which could cost more than 25 million euros) was part of the coalition agreement. However, only a single party, which got less than five percent of the votes, included it in its manifesto.
Simultaneously, parties holding a majority of seats in the parliament elected in November 2023 were opposed to a pension reform passed in the previous legislative period, yet a reversal of this pension reform was conspicuously absent from the coalition agreement.
Why would the governing parties choose to prevent majority-supported policies from becoming law, while at the same time passing policies most of them do not favour? In both cases, such behaviour was driven by the dynamics of coalition government: parties negotiate coalition agreements which set out the policies that the government will pursue, and which it won’t.
Frustrated majorities, powerful minorities
A key standard of democratic rule is that policy changes supported only by a minority should not prevail. Coalition government can frustrate majority rule when policy changes supported by a minority become law and through decisions not to pursue majority-supported policies. It thus poses a substantial challenge to democratic responsiveness.
In a recent study, we quantify how often coalition government frustrates majority rule, drawing on a dataset covering all policy proposals with budgetary implications made by Dutch governing parties in their election manifestos over five terms, linking these to the policies included in subsequent coalition agreements.
We show that minority policymaking is commonplace under coalition governments. The number of policies included in a coalition agreement which fail to command majority support is substantially larger than the number of policies included that are supported by a parliamentary majority. At the same time, over 30% of proposals with majority support are not included in a coalition agreement.
Impediments to majority rule
In a legislature, if the distribution of seats reflects the distribution of preferences among the voters, the floor median will reflect the majority preference of the population. A spatial model of legislative policymaking with a single-dimensional policy space and single-shot decision-making predicts that the position of the median legislator will be the policy outcome, as that position cannot be beaten by another policy in a majority vote, meaning that a popular majority will prevail in the legislative process.
However, majoritarian electoral systems can give parties supported by a minority of voters a majority of seats, meaning that the legislative median may diverge from the popular median position. This is particularly concerning if parties fail to converge on the position of the median voter.
This is often given as a reason to avoid majoritarian electoral systems, and instead to favour proportional electoral systems. However, we propose and illustrate the existence of an additional empirical concern regarding the practice of majority rule in legislatures, even when these accurately mirror the voters’ preferences: coalition agreements.
Policymaking in parliamentary regimes with coalition governments is predominantly driven by the governing coalition, with the actual decisions being made during coalition bargaining, where coalition parties agree on a package deal, including agreements not to pursue specific policies.
Since every party in a minimum-winning coalition government can veto policy changes, in particular at the coalition agreement negotiation stage, a policy change favoured by a majority of the legislature may fail to end up in the coalition agreement. In this case, we would observe a frustrated majority, that is, a parliamentary majority which is unable to prevail even under majority rule.
However, if all the coalition parties vetoed all policy changes that they disagreed with, the legislative agenda of a government would grind to a halt. Alternatively, coalition parties may engage in policy “log-rolls”, where policies favoured by some of the coalition parties are accepted by the others in return for similar support for policies that only these other parties favour. Thus, policies without majority support in the legislature can nevertheless become law, leading to minority rule.
Counting policy proposals
Systematically observing all policy change in a country is difficult. An unusual feature of the Dutch political system allows us to overcome this. Parties in the Netherlands submit their election manifestos to the Netherlands Bureau of Economic Analysis (Centraal Planbureau, CPB). This estimates the budgetary impact of every policy measure proposed therein.
In order to include them in this calculation, parties have to make their policy proposals concrete. Following the government formation, the CPB applies the same process to the coalition agreement. Given the politically neutral and respected role of the CPB, the budgetary impact estimates it produces play a key role in coalition negotiations.
As the scoring of the policy proposals made in manifestos and coalition agreements are done in the same manner, we can observe what each party wanted in terms of policy change and the extent to which this was included in the coalition agreement. Hence, we can assess the extent to which floor majorities are frustrated and minority rule occurs. We examine five coalition agreements: 2007, 2010, 2012, 2017, and 2022.
In the following section, all references to floor/plenary majorities refer to policies that parties holding a majority of seats supported in their manifestos (that is, sincere support). Table 1 shows the share and number of policies included in coalition agreements with and without sincere majority floor support. The average proposal included in a coalition agreement is supported only by a parliamentary minority, with only 32% living up to the basic ideal of majority rule. The median number of votes in support of policies included in coalition agreements is only 63, well short of a floor majority (76).
Table 1: Policies in coalition agreements
Note: Compiled by the authors.
Table 2 shows that parliamentary majorities are regularly frustrated. Policies with a sincere floor majority in favour are commonly excluded from a coalition agreement. One such policy is excluded for every six policies included in coalition agreements. There are almost half as many excluded policies with a sincere majority in favour as there are policies included with majority support and of all policies with majority support, only 70% are included.
Table 2: Frustrated majorities
Note: Compiled by the authors.
Violations of majority rule
Analysing a unique dataset of policy pledges and negotiation outcomes, we have shown that coalition government often violates majority rule. Over two decades, nearly one in three policies supported by a majority was excluded from coalition agreements.
Frustrated floor majorities, while problematic, can occur for reasons other than a minority veto, such as budgetary constraints. Policy changes supported only by a minority, having successfully overcome the inertia of the policymaking process, are normatively more problematic. Yet a majority of policy proposals included in Dutch coalition agreements did not have the sincere support of a parliamentary majority.
While different understandings of democracy assign different importance to the direct translation of the people’s policy preferences into policy, no vision of democracy would favour minority rule. A trade-off appears to exist: while proportional representation usually avoids the failure of majority rule caused by an electoral minority being translated into a parliamentary majority, this comes at the cost of failures of majority rule at the lawmaking stage.
In addition to allowing for broader input into the policymaking process, since proportional representation makes coalition government much more likely, it also leads to widespread minority rule. Given that parliamentary regimes experience coalition government over 70% of the time, the concerns raised here apply widely.
For more information, see the authors’ accompanying paper at Party Politics
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: European Union
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