The Impact of Government Majority Status on Parliamentary Behaviour: Comparing Sweden and the Netherlands

Parliamentary studies mainly focus on single-country studies, limiting the use of historical experience and cross-national variation as explanatory factors. As a result, many studies have focused on (rational) incentives within political systems, such as the divide between government and opposition and electoral incentives, rather than the importance of existing norms and practices. This study analyses how the strength of the division between government and opposition is affected by a country's experience with minority and majority government. Norms about parliamentary behaviour, developed under one type of cabinet rule, may persist, even when a different type of cabinet comes into power. Analysing parliamentary voting patterns in the Netherlands (with a history of majority cabinets but one recent minority cabinet) and Sweden (with a history of minority cabinets, interrupted by majority cabinets), it finds that previous experience of majority respectively minority coalition government structures coalition behaviour even after a change in coalition status.