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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 inmultiparty parliamentary systems. I study a general bargaining environmentwith a policy space of arbitrary finite dimension, any number of politicalparties, and a general class of preferences over the government agreementspace. I find that only majority governments form in the absence ofsignificant political disagreement. However, I show that, except forknife-edge situations, minority government are formed with positiveprobability when parties represented in parliament are sufficientlyideologically polarized.

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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 andEconomics, Department of Political Science and Department ofEconomics, University of Rochester, Harkness Hall, Rochester, 14627 NY (kalandrakis@rochester.edu). Theauthor thanks David Baron, Daniel Diermeier, John Duggan, HeinGoemans, John Roemer, Ken Shepsle, and audiences at the University ofWashington, St. Louis, Caltech, Stanford, Waterloo, and the 2006 CRETEConference for helpful comments. Early versions of this paper havealso benefited from the comments of seminar participants at Yale andNYU. The author is responsible for all errors.

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