Do Minority Cabinets Govern More Flexibly and Inclusively? Evidence from Germany

Abstract

A widespread view in political science is that minority cabinets govern more flexibly and inclusively, more in line with a median-oriented and 'consensual' vision of democracy. Yet there is only little empirical evidence for it. We study legislative coalition-building in the German state of North-Rhine-Westphalia, which was ruled by a minority government between 2010 and 2012. We compare the inclusiveness of legislative coalitions under minority and majority cabinets, based on 1028 laws passed in the 1985–2017 period, and analyze in detail the flexibility of legislative coalition formation under the minority government. Both quantitative analyses are complemented with brief case studies of specific legislation. We find, first, that the minority cabinet did not rule more inclusively. Second, the minority cabinet’s legislative flexibility was fairly limited; to the extent that it existed, it follows a pattern that cannot be explained on the basis of the standard spatial model with policy-seeking parties.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Steffen Ganghof is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Potsdam. His research focuses on democratic theory, political institutions and political economy. His articles have appeared in the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and the European Journal of Political Research, among others.

Sebastian Eppner is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Social Sciences and Economics, University of Potsdam. His research focuses on political institutions, party competition and democratic representation in advanced democracies as well as quantitative research methods.

Christian Stecker is a postdoctoral researcher at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research. His research focuses on the design of democratic institutions, party competition and legislative politics. His work has been published in journals such as the European Journal of Political Research, Political Analysis, Party Politics, and West European Politics.

Katja Heeß was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for the Study of Democracy at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Her research focuses on political institutions and their development. In her dissertation she analysed institutional change of legislative veto points in parliamentary democracies.

Stefan Schukraft was a research fellow at the Chair of Comparative Politics, University of Potsdam. He wrote his PhD thesis about patterns of legislative conflict in the German Länder.

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA AND RESEARCH MATERIALS

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2019.1635120

ORCID

Christian Stecker http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9577-7151

Notes

1 Other notable instances of minority governments in Germany are the two SPD-led minority governments that ruled Saxony-Anhalt between 1994 and 2002.

2 Strøm’s (1990, 62) definition of formal minority cabinets also entails that parliamentary support ‘(1) was negotiated prior to the formation of the government, and (2) takes the form of an explicit, comprehensive, and more than short-term commitment to the policies as well as the survival of the government’. We discuss elsewhere (Ganghof and Stecker 2015), that it is useful to differentiate between the types of legislative coalitions minority cabinets build and how these types are institutionalised in long-term agreements or ad-hoc-coordination (see also Bale and Bergman 2006a, 2006b).

3 We like to thank Franz Urban Pappi for kindly providing his data on party positions and saliences in North Rhine-Westphalia. The grouping of issues into raw dimensions was done by Pappi and Seher (2014). We exclude a fifth dimension (environment), because no non-technical bill was passed during the minority government’s term that would fit into that category. We use the previous government’s position as an approximation of the status quo. The positions are normalised using the status quo on each dimension.

4 It remains controversial how actively the Red-Green government provoked this bargaining failure in order to trigger early elections (Goos 2012; Morfeld 2015, 141–144; Pfafferott 2018, 334–348).

5 One third of those bills adapted state laws to new European and federal rulings. Another third consolidated terminable laws without further controversy. Two further bills regulated the organisation of parliament, which is usually done with a broad consensus between parties. We treat the (more heated) discussions about the increase of allowances for members of parliament as non-technical. Examples of other bills we deemed technical included a bill that made it possible for cities to name themselves ‘University town’ on their official town signs or a bill that introduced a new accounting system in certain areas of the administration.

6 Morfeld (2015, 66) quantitatively identified a list of 15 key bills that were passed during the minority government's term. All of those key bills have been classified as non-technical or political by both our qualitative and quantitative indicators. This increases our trust in our indicators’ ability to effectively get rid of purely technical bills while not falsely identifying political bills as technical.

7 If we count abstaining parties as supporters, 38 (64 per cent) of coalitions are oversized.

8 Our main results are robust to an alternative treatment of abstentions. If we count abstentions as support, the inclusiveness of the minority government is even significantly smaller than that of majority governments based on model 3.

9 ‘Consensual’ here means the absence of any nay votes.

10 One might argue that the first of these two bills belongs into the ‘finance’ category. However, the responsible department was the department of the interior and the main committee was the municipal committee. Indeed, the bill is as much about financial aid to communes as it shapes the powers of communes versus the Land (‘kommunale Selbstverwaltung’). More importantly, our qualitative study confirms that parties actual policy positions are better approximated by the estimated positions along the ‘interior’ dimension, with the FDP being positioned to the left of the status quo.

11 There are other examples for the importance of the early election threat (Burger 2011). One is the abolition of University tuition fees. Whereas the government planned to abolish them only from the winter term 2011/2012, the Left Party pushed for an immediate abolition. The government had to withdraw a motion which planned to delay the abolition because the Left Party refused to support it. Just before another vote, the prime minister threatened the Left Party with early elections. As this party polled less than the 5 per cent of votes necessary to gain any seats in parliament, it eventually agreed on the delayed abolition.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: [Grant Number ga 1696/2-1].