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A Theory of Minority and Majority Governments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 December 2014

Tasos Kalandrakis
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Abstract

I develop a theory of the emergence of minority and majority governments in multiparty parliamentary systems. I study a general bargaining environment with a policy space of arbitrary finite dimension, any number of political parties, and a general class of preferences over the government agreement space. I find that only majority governments form in the absence of significant political disagreement. However, I show that, except for knife-edge situations, minority government are formed with positive probability when parties represented in parliament are sufficiently ideologically polarized.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , May 2015 , pp. 309 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2014 

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Footnotes

*

Tasos Kalandrakis, Associate Professor of Political Science and Economics, Department of Political Science and Department of Economics, University of Rochester, Harkness Hall, Rochester, 14627 NY (kalandrakis@rochester.edu). The author thanks David Baron, Daniel Diermeier, John Duggan, Hein Goemans, John Roemer, Ken Shepsle, and audiences at the University of Washington, St. Louis, Caltech, Stanford, Waterloo, and the 2006 CRETE Conference for helpful comments. Early versions of this paper have also benefited from the comments of seminar participants at Yale and NYU. The author is responsible for all errors.

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