Minority Governments in Western Democracies

All the theories of coalition formation known to us incorporate an assumption (or a set of assumptions which imply) that coalitions which are formed must at least be ‘winning’. 1 In the present context, a coalition is said to be winning if the sum of the seats held by its members is at least a simple majority of all the seats in the parliament. Most of these theories were intended to apply to government coalitions: indeed, several of them were specifically designed for this situation. Yet out of the total of 207 governments which have formed in twelve western democracies since the war, 2 seventy-four of them have not been winning.