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Support Party Strategies on Important Policy Issues: Results from Swedish Minority Governments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2022

Melanie Müller Open the ORCID record for Melanie Müller [Opens in a new window]
Melanie Müller*
Affiliation:
Department of Social Science, University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany
*
*Corresponding author. Email: melanie.mueller@sowi.uni-kl.de
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Abstract

The survival of minority governments depends on support from non-cabinet parties that strive to safeguard government stability while also fulfilling their accountability to the electorate. This article argues that non-cabinet parties' propensity to support the government depends on their desire to uphold distinctiveness when accountability is at stake. This even applies to opposition parties that are officially committed to minority government support and, as a trade-off, receive policy pay-offs. By analysing opposition party voting in 23 years of Swedish minority governments (1991–2018), the article suggests that ideologically distant support parties are more likely to oppose the government on their core issues since compromise would involve too-large concessions. These results question our understanding of support party pay-offs as a trade-off for minority government support and highlight the rationality of entering a support agreement, which gives the support party a certain degree of policy influence while also keeping a distinct party profile.

Keywords

minority governmentsmultilevel modellingopposition partiessupport party pay-offsaliency theorySweden
Type
Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , January 2024 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Government and Opposition Limited

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