Abstract
While about a third of governments in Europe since 1945 have been minority governments, their governing dynamics and performance are largely underresearched by the extant literature and many of the theoretical expectations remain untested, Field argues. Furthermore, minority governments are often regarded as weak and ineffective, which Field clearly disapproves of. The book offers an encompassing review of the different dimensions upon which minority (parliamentary) governments can be examined, namely: how well they govern in comparison to other cabinet types; how they build parliamentary majorities; and their governing capacity in terms of legislative success, duration in office and electoral performance after cabinet termination. For all these dimensions, Field identifies the opportunities and constraints created by political institutions, the reconcilability of party goals and the contingent partisan bargaining circumstances. The novelty and specific contribution of Field’s framework is that it includes a multilevel perspective that pays attention to the territorial distribution of state power and the territorial interests of political parties.
This book expands our understanding of why and how minority governments work by focusing on decentralized political systems which have a highly salient territorial cleavage and several relevant regional parties. While these features apparently seem to run counter to the stability and efficacy of minority governments, Field shows that it is precisely because of such traits that minority governments can be as stable and efficient as majority governments, even when the formateur does not hold the core party status in the national parliament. The empirical analysis builds on the Spanish case, where single-party minority governments have been very common, ranging from formalized support agreements to ad hoc alliances, although throughout the book a comparative approach, especially with the Nordic countries, is systematically provided.
Why Minority Governments Work shows that, in multilevel settings, political institutions and partisan bargaining circumstances generally help to strengthen the government’s bargaining power, not least because statewide and regional parties’ goals are often reconcilable, thereby facilitating cooperation and at times unexpected accommodations across state levels. The reason lies in the fact that party goals, the corresponding type of political exchanges, as well as parties’ political weight vary across territorial arenas. Indeed, as Field highlights, a multilevel state with a multidimensional party system – that is, left–right and centre–periphery – increases the likelihood that party goals may be reconcilable. Since statewide and regional parties prioritize distinct dimensions of party competition, political exchanges can be crafted at different state levels. Statewide parties in particular, in exchange for achieving their priority goal of governing at the national level, can make policy concessions to regional parties in the national parliament – where regional parties are policy seeking – and offer office concessions at the regional level – where regional parties are office seeking. Therefore, analyses of partisan bargaining circumstances must include both the national and the regional levels and factor in the governing circumstances not only of the formateur at the national level but also of their support, typically regional parties, at the regional level. Yet, even when regional parties do not govern in their region the ‘policy for votes’ exchange can also allow them to gain momentum vis-à-vis the regional government.
The empirical research is rich and exhaustive, providing several indicators for each of the dimensions under examination that can travel across countries and time. There is no single indicator to assessing the governing capacity of minority governments that readers will not find in the book. The impressive accumulation of data and the thorough account of the Spanish case will make the book indispensable not only for Spanish politics scholars but also, more generally, for those studying coalition politics. As noted by Field, the variables used to account for a strong governing capacity of minority governments can combine in different ways, making it harder or easier to govern under a minority status.
However, the book lacks a more dynamic temporal perspective in the examination of party strategies and goals, including the limits of the multilevel political exchange based on ‘policy for votes’ fostered by the radicalization of regionalist parties’ demands or the increasing competition among statewide parties on the centre–periphery cleavage. Both factors may indeed constrain the capacity of the minority government to deliver further territorial policy concessions to regional parties in exchange for votes in the national parliament. From a multilevel perspective, it would also be interesting to disentangle whether the concessions made by the national minority government are more or less costly depending on the regional governing circumstances.
Some of the examined traits that boost the stability and efficacy of minority governments may be specific to the Spanish case, such as parliamentary institutions that strongly tip the balance in favour of the government; the fact that all minority governments fell rather short (between 7 and 20 seats) of an absolute majority up to 2015; the relatively open-ended nature of the territorial model; and the tight vertical integration of statewide parties through which they can impose the political exchanges to their regional branches. This notwithstanding, Field convincingly shows how her framework can be applied cross nationally beyond the book’s main case study, in both unitary and decentralized states. All in all, this work stands as a vital contribution to the scholarship of coalition politics and multilevel politics, contributes to key debates in both fields, and provides an insightful and comprehensive framework for furthering their study.