I develop a theory of the emergence of minority and majority governments in
multiparty parliamentary systems. I study a general bargaining environment
with a policy space of arbitrary finite dimension, any number of political
parties, and a general class of preferences over the government agreement
space. I find that only majority governments form in the absence of
significant political disagreement. However, I show that, except for
knife-edge situations, minority government are formed with positive
probability when parties represented in parliament are sufficiently
ideologically polarized.