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Captives No Longer, but Servants Still? Contract Parliamentarism and the New Minority Governance in Sweden and New Zealand1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Tim Bale  and
Torbjörn Bergman
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Abstract

Recent years have seen the institutionalization of minority governance in Sweden and New Zealand. Large, historic social democratic labour parties enjoy comparative security of tenure thanks to smaller, newer parties with whom they have signed long-term, detailed support agreements covering both policy and process. This trend toward ‘contract parliamentarism’ owes much to party-system dynamics, but also to the accretion of experience, to cultural norms and to institutional constraints – all of which, along with electoral contingency, explain why the trend has gone slightly further in one polity than in the other. While the trend seems to favour the left in general, its implications for the support or ‘servant’ parties, and – more normatively – for democracy itself, may be less favourable.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , 2006 , pp. 422 - 449
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2006

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Footnotes

1

The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for their constructive comments on this article. We are also very grateful to Magnus Blomgren for his help with the design of Figure 1.

References

2 The concept of ‘contract parliamentarism’ was first used in Torbjörn Bergman and Nicholas Aylott, ‘Parlamentarism per kontrakt? Blir den svenska innovationen länglivad?’, in Riksdagens ärsbok 2002/03, Stockholm, Riksdagen, 2003, pp. 4–7.Google Scholar

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