'Why have coalitions become degenerate arrangements?', asks professor.
Marcos André Melo, a professor of political science at the Federal University of Pernambuco, states that coalitions have become degenerate arrangements between politicians and their mere interests of systemic survival; he quotes British Prime Minister Disraeli: "the English detest coalitions," but adds former German Prime Minister Willy Brandt: "it sounds like a perverted sexual act."
247 – Marcos André Melo, a professor of political science at the Federal University of Pernambuco, states that coalitions have become degenerate arrangements between politicians and their mere interests of systemic survival. He quotes British Prime Minister Disraeli: "The English detest coalitions," but adds former German Prime Minister Willy Brandt: "It sounds like a perverted sexual act."
"I wouldn't venture any conjectures about what Brandt would say regarding the alliances being forged for the presidential elections. The rejection of coalitions is part of a strong tradition for which the best institutional design is the Westminster model, whose foundations are parliamentarism and voting in single-member constituencies, which produces a two-party system. For its defenders, this model produces governments responsible to parliament, with clarity of responsibility, 'identifiability,' and accountability: the voter knows who to blame if something goes wrong, who is in charge, and the fall of the cabinet is automatic in the absence of parliamentary support."
However, coalition governments are currently the modal form of governmental arrangement: almost 80% of parliamentary countries and 52% of presidential countries have multi-party coalitions. A discussion of the pathologies of the Westminster model will be left for another column. Here, we are only interested in one point: the near-historical consensus surrounding this model has been reversed. The arrangement that would characterize good governance for most experts since the 1970s is the so-called consensual model of democracy, represented by the Scandinavian countries and by the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Austria.”