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Governing without a majority. What consequences in Westminster systems?

This special section showcases four papers first presented at a conference organised in November 2010 at the Université de Montréal. The conference’s point of departure was simple: given the political context in several countries with Westminster-style parliamentary institutions, and especially the UK since May 2010, Canada from 2006 until 2010, and Australia in 2010, we asked participants to explore the consequences of minority or coalition Parliaments for the political process. The four articles published here all provide an answer to this question. Contrary to popular impressions and media presentations, experiences with minority and coalition government have been relatively frequent in systems governed by the rules and norms of Westminster. Nonetheless, the embedded notions of politics dominated by the Government and the Opposition mean that such moments in political time are often feared, with minority governments termed ‘hung Parliaments’ in British political discourse. They certainly provoke media attention, sometimes leading to the cliffhanger style of analysis so familiar in Canada that continually asks, ‘will Parliament fall today?’ Surprisingly, however, the consequences of minority and coalition governments in these Westminster systems have not, with a few notable exceptions, attracted sustained attention from political scientists and political sociologists. There is a long tradition and a huge literature, for example, of positing a link between proportional representation and parliamentary outcomes, including those with Westminster-style institutions. Others analyse effects on the strength or stability of government (for example, Cairney, 2011), including the factors that can make minority governments work (Hazall & Paun, 2009,