Communication and the Life Cycle of Parliamentary Democracy

The study of coalition politics in parliamentary democracies has come a long way from its one-time conception of coalition bargaining as episodic and mutually isolated events, brought about spontaneously and exogenously by a general election or by the sudden fall of an incumbent government. Bargaining is in fact a continuously ongoing process that involves much more than capturing the spoils of government once and for all. And while all political regimes may be characterized by ongoing bargaining, such continuous negotiations are particularly critical to parliamentary democracies, since it is in the very nature of such polities that the right to rule is renegotiate at any time, with no advance notice, and in most cases on the basis of no direct consultation with the voters. But while power is for this reason always and continuously insecure, there are nevertheless seasons in parliamentary politics. There is a season for building cooperation and mechanisms of joint governance, and there is a season for abandoning them. And there is a season for listening to and communicating with voters and party supporters. In a forthcoming large-scale collaborative study of European parliamentary democracies (Strom, Muller, and Bergman 2008), we refer to this seasonality as the life cycle of parliamentary politics. The Parliamentary Life Cycle Coalition bargaining consists in a cyclical set of events, the sequence of which is sometimes given and sometimes negotiable. These phases are cabinet formation, governance, and termination. Governance in this context denotes both the practice of governing and the stage in the political cycle devoted to policy execution and implementation. What completes this cycle, and brings democracy back into parliamentary democracy, is elections. It is through elections that political parties receive their endowment of parliamentary seats and hence their bargaining power. Nonetheless, or precisely for that reason, the electoral connection is probably the aspect of coalition politics that scholars have most seriously neglected. Figure 1 illustrates this parliamentary life cycle. Cycles of political competition such as these are not, of course, an exclusive property of coalitions or parliamentary democracy. Rather, the life of any democratic government can be described under these headings. Yet, parliamentary polities, especially if they are also centralized, may be more profoundly shaped by a single political cycle than presidential and especially also federal systems, in which different political cycles more commonly interact and compete. Furthermore, parliamentary systems differ among themselves, as each stage of bargaining is more complex under multiparty coalitions than under single-party majority government. Whereas the electoral cycles that drive two-party parliamentary politics are powerful and comparatively simple, those that condition the coalitions game in multiparty contexts can be far more complex, but not necessarily any less powerful. Though the literature on coalition politics in parliamentary democracies is in many ways impressive, there are still serious lacunae and imbalances. One is directly related to the parliamentary life cycle: scholars have by no means given equal attention to these various stages of parliamentary politics. In a previous publication, Wolfgang C. Muller and I likened the cabinet coalitions literature to the romantic Hollywood films of the 1950s: "Much is made of the courtship process and 'who gets whom,' whereas relatively little light is shed on how such alliances actually work" (Strom and Muller 1999, 255). Thus, the life cycle of coalitions has received the same selective attention as that of onscreen marriages: the focus has been on the formative moments of coalition relationships, not on their day-to-day negotiations, achievements, or terminations. The picture that has emerged has emphasized the happier and more glorious moments of political togetherness (Muller and Strom 2000, 13, 16-25). …