Why does av lead to more coalitions

But while it is novel in Britain, in Europe, coalitions have been the norm for decades. Currently across the 27 countries of the European Union, 20 or nearly two thirds are currently coalition governments. Looking in more detail, ten EU countries including France, Germany and the UK have governing coalitions are composed of a mainstream centre-right party in coalition with a Liberal party.

Two other countries have coalitions governments including only rightist parties Italy and Poland and three centre-left coalition governments are struggling with major crises of public spending Spain, Portugal and Cyprus , all in the south. Three countries have a single party of the right in power as in Hungary, Bulgaria, and Malta , and one of the left Greece, also in the south and struggling with austerity pressures.

As as my chart below shows from to and based on the proportion of time in office, only three countries in western Europe Britain, Spain and Greece had no significant experience of coalition government. Percentage of time of single-party governments vs.

Forming a coalition government was quite a U-turn for Cameron, who had castigated hung parliaments and coalitions as unworkable during the election campaign.

Yet British public opinion has been generally supportive of the new coalition , at least in the short term, helped by the swift and efficient manner in which Cameron and Clegg agreed on a programme for government. The two leaders drew on the most coherent and less divisive aspects of each party manifesto. They agreed to some sensible trade-offs on education, civil liberties, constitutional reform and fiscal policy, and they generally allocated cabinet portfolios on merit rather than partisanship.

Amazingly, this did not provoke any apparent discontent among the Conservative shadow cabinet members, who had to forgo their prospective slots to allow the Liberal Democrats five cabinet posts and several junior ministers. Coalitions are often accused of being incapable of making tough decisions, unable to implement the radical policies necessary to kick-start recovery in times of economic crisis.

Critics on the right often argue that, under any form of power-sharing agreement, Margaret Thatcher, for example, would have never been able to implement her neo-liberal agenda of privatisation and union restraint.

Coalition-building pressures inside the Conservative party and the country presented as much, if not more, of a challenge for Thatcher than they did for Cameron since today both Conservative and Lib Dem have everything to gain by keeping the government coalition going. Obviously, coalition building in such an environment is a complex, unstable process and the resulting government is often extremely vulnerable to the whims of its varied participants.

Belgium may or may not dissolve into two separate countries but the example highlights how different the structure of the British party system is from its Belgian counterpart.

Of these 53 one party majority governments, 20 of them were British. Only Norway, Greece and Ireland have ever had more than 5 single party governments since It increasingly seems unlikely that a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition will be formed, because the Conservatives are highly unlikely to agree to a referendum on PR. A Labour-LibDem coalition under a new Labour leader might be possible. The truth is that AV is not any kind of proportional representation.

It is a thoroughly majoritarian system. Australia is the only major country in the world that uses AV for its lower house. There AV has produced levels of disproportionality that are comparable with and sometimes even worse than the current Westminster system of single member plurality voting.

With the exception of one or two possible independents, the only place to look for these resources is the Celtic fringe. The very canny Alex Salmond has ruled out joining a coalition — a shrewd move because his party probably was never going to be asked anyway.

Meanwhile, on the far right, the fledgling party Alternative for Germany AfD established itself even faster. Five percent threshold? No problem. It had already benefited from the shrinking of the two big-tent parties. Their inability to take the environmental movement seriously and the lightning speed of neoliberal reform in East Germany had taken its toll. A simple two-party coalition became increasingly difficult to pull off. The era of the grand coalition had dawned. Merkel has been in power for four terms — three of them in a grand coalition.

She shined in the glow of an economy booming against all odds while the SPD floundered. The stable economy and a Merkel-friendly media environment helped the savvy chancellor to succeed at each and every federal election.

Merkel is seen as a steady hand at the wheel despite erratic U-turns. She most famously experimented with a hardline message in response to the refugee crisis before abruptly changing course after the tragic picture of a drowned child on a beach infuriated Christian groups.

Then she changed course again, paying Turkey billions of euros to deal with the problem within its own borders. The AfD can claim the established parties are all the same, that politics is just a big show and that an alternative is desperately needed.