Small but Powerful? The Legislative Bargaining Success of Minority Governments

Due to the increasing fragmentation and polarization in national legislatures, the formation of minority governments became more frequent all over Europe and even a practical expedient in countries without former experience of minority governance (e.g. the UK or the Netherlands). Still, we know very little about the legislative work and success of minority governments. This paper aims to shed light on the legislative work and policy making abilities of minority governments. Since minority cabinets need to negotiate with non-cabinet actors in order to organize legislative majorities for their policy proposals, non-cabinet parties may be able to draw policies away from the ideal points of the cabinet. In this study, I analyze the bargaining success of minority governments and support parties regarding legislative policy making. I develop and test theoretical expectations based on the parties’ ideological positions and strength in parliament, the institutional agenda setter powers of governments, and the formality of legislative policy agreements between cabinet and non-cabinet parties. The empirical analyses are based on a newly compiled dataset on legislative decision making under six minority governments in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. It contains information on approx. 80 contested issues of more than 50 legislative policy proposals between 2010 and 2017. Following the strategy of the DEU-Project (Thomson et al. 2006), the information was gathered during semi-structured expert interviews (i.e. MPs and civil servants in parliament) in order to estimate the bargaining success of parties under minority rule. My findings have important implications for the understanding of minority governance and contribute to the fields of legislative studies, policy making, and party competition.