Minority and multi-party government

As Campbell Sharman will discuss in Chapter 8, the existence of an autonomous upper house upsets the majoritarian tradition of Westminster parliamentary democracy. Minority and multi-party governments in the lower house further and fundamentally test the tenets of the Westminster political system. In one of the landmark texts in the field of comparative politics, Patterns of Democracy (1999, 2012), Arend Lijphart delineates between two models of democracy: Westminster and consensus. Traditional Westminster systems are generally majoritarian (adversarial) dominated by two major parties, with minimal incentive to form cross-party alliances if party discipline is maintained (Paun 2011: 440–1). The advent of multi-party and minority government is described as ‘one of the most significant developments among Westminster democracies’, particularly in the United Kingdom and Australia where it is not a consequence of proportional representation (Curtin and Miller 2011: 3). For a brief period in 2011, all four key Westminster parliaments lacked single-party majorities.