Coalitions are groupings of rival political units in the face of a common enemy; they occur in situations where protection from that enemy, or the furtherance of some shared goal, overrides differences and potential conflicts between the members of the coalition. Coalitions usually occur in modern parliaments when no single political party can muster a majority of votes. Two or more parties, who have enough elected members between them to form a majority, may then be able to agree on a common programme that does not require too many drastic compromises with their individual policies, and can proceed to form a government.
Coalitions vary in their stability, their life expectancy, and in the way power is distributed within them (which may or may not be related to the relative sizes of the parties involved). Some coalitions are so long established, and so obviously essential if the aspirations of either party are to be realized, that they virtually comprise a new party in its own right. Thus the only hope of being in government for the Liberal Democrats in the UK, the National Party in Australia or the Free Democrats in Germany are alliances they can form. In the case of Australia the National Party’s alliance with the Liberals is, consequently, virtually indestructible. However, political change can break up what seem almost totally united alliances. From 1969 to 1982 West Germany was ruled by a coalition of Social Democrats and Free Democrats which many commentators thought indissoluble. Nevertheless, the Free Democrats ended the alliance, and Germany was then ruled by a coalition of Christian Democrats and Free Democrats. In part this demonstrates the counter-intuitive power that a very small party such as the Free Democrats could wield: as it was the only possible partner for two other parties, neither of which were likely to want to coalesce with the other, that small party was able to dominate politics. Only when a second small party, the Greens, became electorally successful enough to be an alternative coalition partner on the left, in 1998, did the Social Democrats return to power. Indeed, it is this disproportionate power of small political entities that is often used as the principal argument against proportional representation.
Coalitions can occur in any political situation involving several rival forces which are in fairly close agreement on essentials. Sometimes they are only intended to be short-lived, or even concerned with a single issue: voting in the multi-party assembly of the French Fourth Republic always involved the creation of an ad hoc majority of deputies who were agreed only on supporting a particular bill; and despite the two-party system the same situation prevails in the US Congress. Though often accused of leading to unstable governments, coalitions are in fact more likely to be the result of political instability than its cause, and occur wherever several political forces, whether because of electoral rules or some other mechanisms, exist in a rough equilibrium. Traditionally Britain has only resorted to coalition governments in time of war or severe economic crisis, but this is largely because the electoral machinery seldom produces a parliament in which no single party has a majority. When this has occurred, as in the last years of the 1974–79 Labour government, a coalition has been created in fact if not in name.
Coalitions are of equal importance in international relations, especially in defence policy. Few major wars for the last three centuries have actually been fought between two countries (the Franco–Prussian War being an unusual counter-example), instead, they have been coalition wars. In this context there can be either ad hoc coalitions, forged by the crisis of a war where naturally opposed partners have to co-operate to defeat a common enemy, the Second World War coalition between the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the USA being a good example, or long-standing arrangements made in peacetime between countries with common aims against a common group of enemies, the post-war opposition between NATO and the now defunct Warsaw Pact being an obvious example. Interestingly, in both domestic and international contexts the main restriction of coalition formation is ideological: if any subset of actors can form a coalition only on specific, precise and short-term issues, coalitions will be short-lived, unstable and unpredictable. In international relations, for example, the traditional balance-of-power theory relies precisely on the notion that there are no ideological barriers to any coalition forming. In extreme cases of domestic politics one can find the same ‘open texture’ to coalition potential. In both domestic and foreign affairs, however, such openness is unusual, and the range of possible coalitions is much diminished. Coalition theory, the study of the formation of coalitions, has been the study of one of the more successful political science theoretical efforts since the 1950s, and powerful predictive theories, based in part on game theory, have been derived and tested.
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