–Sorry to take so long to get back, Balthisar. Maybe the term “coalition governments” is too strong a word when describing a two-party government, but I ment it the following way:
coalition
An alliance of political groups formed to oppose a common foe or pursue a common goal.
Often coalitions have had to be formed in the congress to assure the passage of bills that would be acceptable to the majority of members and could get signed by a president who was not a member of the party of the congressional majority. However, Tom was on top of it when he described the following:
• In countries with many political parties, none of which can get a majority of the citizens’ votes, the only way an effective government can be formed is by a coalition of parties. Such coalitions are often unstable.
(both of these are from Roget’s II, copyright 1995)
The Canadian experience is that formal coalition governments, where members of different parties all sit in the Cabinet, are rare. They are usually associated with a political or national crisis.
Prior to Confederation, in the old Province of Canada, there was a formal coalition of Liberals, Conservatives and Bleus to put through the Confederation project. The only coalition government at the federal level since Confederation in 1867 was during WWI, when the Conservatives formed a Union government with anglophone Liberals to prosecute the war effort (1917-1919). Since the war was extremely unpopular in Québec, the francophone Liberals continued to sit in opposition. Overall, the Union coalition is credited with contributing greatly to national disunity.
We’ve had several minority governments at the federal level, where no party had a clear majority in the Commons, and had to depend on support from one or more opposition parties to get its legislation through. These arrangements seem more acceptable than a formal coalition.
I believe there have been three coalition governments in the U.K. in the last century, all to deal with times of crisis: Lloyd George’s wartime coalition (1916-1918), Ramsey Macdonald’s coalition in the Great Depression (1931-37?), and the wartime government under Churchill (1942-1945).
Lloyd George’s government was a coalition of Liberals and Conservatives (the last time the Liberals held power in the U.K.). Macdonald’s was a coalition of Labour and Conservatives, and Churchill’s was a coalition of Conservative and Labour - can’t remember if there were a couple of Liberals in Cabinet as well.
[Minor nitpick to tom - “MP” is “member of Parliament.” An MP, if called to the Cabinet, becomes a Minister of the Crown.]
I believe the Greens would have just as hard a time electing a Senator as they did in getting Nader to 5%. It was just too hard to get that sort of candidate elected in a statewide election. About the only state I could ever see electing a Green would be Vermont, where the voting public is rather liberal and not very numerous. However, Vermont just reelected its liberal Republican senator and will probably keep its liberal Democratic senator and Socialist reprsentative for as long as they want their jobs.
In any other state, the Republicans would be able to bury a Green candidate for Senator.
In California, the one Green member of the State Assembly lost her bid for reelection. She had only been elected because there was a low turnout in a special election in a heavily Democratic district. The Green assemblywoman ended up leaving the party and ran as an independent so she wouldn’t have to spend money on the primary. In the end, the Greens abandoned her and the Democrats retook the seat.
The ex-Green, Audie Bock, ended up with only 21.9% of the vote.
I didn’t say it’d be easy, BobT, but … campaigning Nader around many states took lots of time, effort, energy and – critical factor – money. If the Green Party had instead targeted two or three or four states for Senate or House races, not sure how it would have come out. If they had started early enough, they might have got their candidates on the slate as nominal “Democrats,” for instance.
Following up on bibliophage’s comment, here’s a link to the Saskatchewan Coalition Agreement, following the 1999 election, where the voters did not return a majority government.