Periodic Reporting for period 2 - MINORITYRULE (Democracy without Majorities: Political Representation under Minority Rule)
Reporting period: 2023-03-01 to 2024-08-31
The goal of MINORITYRULE is to provide a systematic analysis of the implications of minority governments for political representation in parliamentary democracies. The democratic link between representatives and citizens is established through elections, and majority rule, the aggregation of preferences, is one of the core principles of representative democracy. Ultimately, laws can only pass in parliament if a majority of elected representatives approves. Yet, governments in which cabinet parties do not control parliamentary majorities, and therefore require the support of other parliamentary parties, are a common feature in parliamentary systems. Understanding the possibility of forming minority governments and its implications is crucial as party systems are experiencing drastic changes. Citizens’ voting behavior has become more volatile, new challenger parties – including populist radical right parties – have permanently entered the political landscape, and parliaments have become more fragmented. A comprehensive understanding of the consequences of minority rule for democratic political representation is so far lacking. The aim of MINORITYRULE is to provide this much-needed systematic and evidence-based understanding of the consequences of minority governments for political debate, government decisions, and citizens’ perceptions. The project tackles three fundamental questions: How do minority governments affect party system polarization in parliament and during election campaigns? Why are some minority governments more responsive to public opinion than others? And finally, under what conditions do citizens evaluate minority governments differently than majority governments? MINORITYRULE will answer these questions through an ambitious comparative analysis including novel multilingual text-as-data approaches, opinion surveys, and experiments. The overarching goal is to gain a better, more comprehensive and more systematic understanding of minority governments as an increasing phenomenon in representative democracies and its implications for representation, and thus the functioning of democracy.
The work performed from the beginning of the project has focused on collection and analysis of data on legislative speeches from parliamentary archives, collection and merging of historical public opinion surveys, and the design and conduct of several public opinion survey. In a working paper on the basis of one survey, the MINORITYRULE team analyzed data on the knowledge of citizens about minority governments as a government type in Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. The results show that a majority of respondents is not well informed about the exact definition of a minority government, and that this knowledge is moreover strongly affected by educational background and general political knowledge. Moreover, the analysis reveals that even though citizens cannot precisely define minority governments, they do hold strong opinions about their expected performance. These results provided the basis for survey experiments of the project which examine the conditions under which citizens are willing to support the formation of minority governments. These survey experiments show, among other things, that some citizens are willing to support minority governments if they are formed to keep radical parties out of government. Another working paper produced during the provides a computational text analysis approach to measuring elite polarization in parliamentary debates on the basis of novel human annotated training data that identifies personal attacks in debates. This approach will be applied to several parliaments once the ongoing collection, cleaning and harmonization of parliamentary debate data have been concluded. Finally, another working paper measures responsiveness of governments to public opinion in parliamentary speeches using the test case of Sweden, with initial results suggesting that minority governments are more responsive than majority governments. Together, these insights provide the basis for the comprehensive analysis of polarization, responsiveness, and citizen evaluation in the context of minority governments.
Many parliamentary democracies have experienced the formation of a minority government, which tends to be less stable than majority governments but equally successful in terms of their ability to implement policies. MINORITYRULE includes innovative components that go beyond the state of the art to address one of the most significant challenges democracies are facing. First, the project places an emphasis on representational aspects of minority governments focusing on polarization, government responsiveness to public opinion, and citizen perceptions and support. Thus, it extends research on the formation, stability, and efficiency of minority governments in representative democracies. Second, the project will also provide new insights in helping democracies meet the recent challenges they are facing as a result of changing party systems. It will help identify conditions under which minority governments may lead to successful representation, lower political polarization, more responsiveness domestically and in EU negotiations, and higher perceived legitimacy by citizens. Knowing these conditions is important more generally, as minority governments may be one solution to forming governments without populist far-right parties who have strengthened their parliamentary representation in many countries. At the same time, the project will also be able to point out the limits and weaknesses of minority governments for representation. Third, the project will make several important methodological and empirical contributions of value to comparative scholars of democracy. In light of changing party systems in Europe, MINORITYRULE will generate new insights about the nature of political representation in which cabinets govern without stable majorities in parliament and society. This will have a significant impact on scholarly and societal debate about the legitimacy of minority governments generally.