The Politics of Agreements: Rules and Norms in Legislative-Executive Relations in the Netherlands

The relationship between government and opposition has been argued to be the result of both a rational calculus by both sides as well as norms of (appropriate) behaviour. It is, however, often difficult to disentangle these explanations, because norms and incentives often go hand in hand. In majoritarian democracies, the adversarial style of executive-legislative interactions goes together the two-party electoral competition, while the more cooperative executive-legislative relations in consensus democracies are associated with fragmented electoral competition. When the institutional context suddenly changes, however, we are able to observe whether political actors continue to observe existing norms of behaviour or rationally adjust to the new situation. This paper explores such a change in the institutional context: the change from majority coalition cabinet rule to minority cabinets in the Netherlands (2010-2017). The Dutch have had a strong tradition of majority cabinet rule, but this was suddenly upset when a minority coalition (with a support party) was formed in 2010. After early elections in 2012, a newly formed cabinet lacked a majority in the upper house, which meant that the government depended on opposition party support to push through their legislative agenda. How did the new minority government situation affect the relationship between the government and opposition parties? We examine two contrasting expectations: first, that that norms about consensus democracy would lead parties to cooperate with minority cabinets. That cooperation would be characterized by consensual norms such as pragmatism, secrecy, depoliticization, expertise and the idea ‘the government governs’. Second, that chances to destabilize the government would lead rational parties to act more aggressively: opposing deals, politicizing issues and criticizing secrecy. We explore this question using both a quantitative analysis of parliamentary voting patterns as well as semi-structured interviews with (former) politicians. This sheds new light on the question of the explanations of government-opposition behaviour that are relevant to the study of executive-legislative relations in Western Europe.