Elections not involving the US?

[Mnementh]

Mr Khan said:

Pineapple said:

Personally, I find that countries are generally run the best when they're coalition governments that still end up without a majority on the parliament. Whenever that's been the case in Norway, we've pretty much done incredibly well. The reason is that you have to get some of the parties who aren't in your coalition to agree with you, and that means you have to think things through and put them forward in the parliament.

That way, the policies that pass are policies that pretty much everybody has to agree with in some way. Sure, it makes the processes slower, and there will be fewer changes, but very few western countries need radical changes at the moment. One of the main problems we have is that one government makes a change, and then the next one undoes it when they're elected. With coalition minorities, virtually all the changes are good.

 

I thought the whole point of parliament was that somebody had to have the majority, to run the thing? Coalition or not, you need that 50% + 1 somehow, or else the executive calls for dissolution of parliament and new rounds of elections...

There is the possibility to have a government, that is backed by a minority in parliament. ans we should remember one thing: In modern democracies we use the principle of separation of powers - for good reasons. If the government (executive) is backed by their own party in parliament (legislative) the borders between the powers are becoming blurry. That leads to the excess, that the government creates laws instead of the parliament.