Small in Size but Powerful in Parliament? The Legislative Performance of Minority Governments

Abstract

Minority cabinets do not control a legislative majority and are thus vulnerable to parliamentary defeat. Consequently, the legislative performance of minority cabinets has been often brought into question. In this article, I argue that minority cabinets do not perform generally worse than majority cabinets. I hypothesize that only substantive minority cabinets which do not enjoy formal majority support by noncabinet parties work significantly worse than majority ones. The empirical analysis is based on a large new dataset that combines original information on minority‐cabinet attributes and legislative data for 197 governments in 21 parliamentary democracies since the 1980s. The results of a fractional logit analysis support my theoretical expectations and show that not all types of minority cabinets perform worse than majority governments. My findings provide a comparative insight into the functioning of minority governments and have important implications for our understanding of legislative politics, party competition, and policymaking.