ABSTRACT
Governments need the confidence of a parliamentary majority to survive in office in Europe’s parliamentary systems of government. They also need a legislative majority to ensure the passage of their legislative proposals. In a few European democracies such as Greece or the United Kingdom, government formation has usually been the result of the voters’ verdict at general elections: A single party usually conquered a majority of the seats in the lower house of parliament and -as long as it could muster sufficient party discipline — used its majority to control the parliamentary agenda and legislative process. However, a study of government formation in 17 parliamentary democracies between 1945 and 1999 showed that only 13 per cent of all cabinets were based on such an overall parliamentary majority of a single party. Approximately 63 per cent consisted of multi-party coalitions, a further 23 per cent were (single or multi-party) minority cabinets tolerated by a sufficient number of MPs on the opposition benches (Saalfeld 2007: 180; for similar, more recent data, see Gallagher et al. 2006: 401). Thus, to understand policy-making in Europe’s parliamentary systems, ‘one must understand above all else the formation and dissolution of coalition governments’ (Martin and Vanberg 2005: 93).
