A coalition government, or coalition cabinet, is a government where political parties enter a power-sharing arrangement of the executive. Coalition governments usually occur when no single party has achieved an absolute majority after an election. A party not having majority is common under proportional representation, but not in nations with majoritarian electoral systems.
Germany is a democratic and federal parliamentary republic, where federal legislative power is vested in the Bundestag and the Bundesrat.
Alliance 90/The Greens, often simply referred to as the Greens, is a green political party in Germany. It was formed in 1993 by the merger of The Greens and Alliance 90. The Greens had itself merged with the East German Green Party after German reunification in 1990.
A green party is a formally organized political party based on the principles of green politics, such as environmentalism and social justice.
The politics of the Netherlands take place within the framework of a parliamentary representative democracy. A constitutional monarchy, the country is organised as a decentralised unitary state. The Netherlands can be described as a consociational state. Dutch politics and governance are characterised by a common striving for broad consensus on important issues, within both of the political community and society as a whole.
The Social Democratic Party of Germany is a centre-left social democratic political party in Germany. It is one of the major parties of contemporary Germany.
The politics of Belgium take place in the framework of a federal, representative democratic, constitutional monarchy. The King of the Belgians is the head of state, and the prime minister of Belgium is the head of government, in a multi-party system. Executive power is exercised by the government. Federal legislative power is vested in both the government and the two chambers of parliament, the Senate and the Chamber of Representatives. The federation is made up of (language-based) communities and (territorial) regions. Philippe is the seventh and current King of the Belgians, having ascended the throne on 21 July 2013.
Green politics, or ecopolitics, is a political ideology that aims to foster an ecologically sustainable society often, but not always, rooted in environmentalism, nonviolence, social justice and grassroots democracy. It began taking shape in the western world in the 1970s; since then green parties have developed and established themselves in many countries around the globe and have achieved some electoral success.
The Swedish Social Democratic Party, formally the SwedishSocial Democratic Workers' Party, usually referred to as The Social Democrats, is a centre-left social-democratic and democratic socialist political party in Sweden. Founded in 1889, the SAP is the country's oldest and currently largest party.
Social conservatism is a political philosophy and a variety of conservatism which places emphasis on traditional power structures over social pluralism. Social conservatives organize in favor of duty, traditional values and social institutions, such as traditional family structures, gender roles, sexual relations, national patriotism, and religious traditions. Social conservatism is usually skeptical of social change, instead tending to support the status quo concerning social issues.
The New Flemish Alliance is a Flemish nationalist and conservative political party in Belgium. The party was established in 2001 by the right-leaning faction of the centrist-nationalist People's Union (VU).
Proporz is a long-standing practice in the Second Austrian Republic in which positions in government are distributed between political parties in a manner proportional to their electoral or public support. More broadly, it describes a culture of power sharing and consensus between Austria's two major parties, the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) and the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ), which developed throughout the period of grand coalition government from 1945 to 1966. During this time, partisan divisions were established in most government institutions and the public service, designed to balance the influence of both parties.
The tyranny of the majority is an inherent weakness to majority rule in which the majority of an electorate pursues exclusively its own objectives at the expense of those of the minority factions. This results in oppression of minority groups comparable to that of a tyrant or despot, argued John Stuart Mill in his 1859 book On Liberty.
The South Schleswig Voters' Association is a regionalist political party in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany. The party represents the Danish and Frisian minorities of the state.
Majority rule is the principle that a group which has more than half of all voters should be allowed to make the decisions for a group. Majority rule is the binary decision rule most often used in decision-making bodies, including many legislatures of democratic nations. Where no one party wins a majority of the seats in a legislature, the majority of legislators that wields power is partly composed of members of other parties in support.
Consociationalism is a form of democratic power sharing. Political scientists define a consociational state as one which has major internal divisions along ethnic, religious, or linguistic lines, but which remains stable due to consultation among the elites of these groups. Consociational states are often contrasted with states with majoritarian electoral systems.
Particracy, also known as partitocracy, partitocrazia or partocracy, is a form of government in which the political parties are the primary basis of rule rather than citizens or individual politicians.
Labour and Social Justice – The Electoral Alternative was a left-wing German political party founded in 2005 by activists disenchanted with the ruling Red-Green coalition government. On 16 June 2007, WASG merged with Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) to form The Left. At the time of its merger with The Left Party. PDS, WASG party membership stood at about 11,600 members.
Classical pluralism is the view that politics and decision-making are located mostly in the framework of government but that many non-governmental groups use their resources to exert influence. The central question for classical pluralism is how power and influence are distributed in a political process. Groups of individuals try to maximize their interests. Lines of conflict are multiple and shifting as power is a continuous bargaining process between competing groups. There may be inequalities but they tend to be distributed and evened out by the various forms and distributions of resources throughout a population. Any change under this view will be slow and incremental, as groups have different interests and may act as "veto groups" to destroy legislation. The existence of diverse and competing interests is the basis for a democratic equilibrium, and is crucial for the obtaining of goals by individuals.
The foundation of the Social Democratic Party of Germany can be traced back to the 1860s, and it has represented the centre-left in German politics for much of the 20th and 21st centuries. From 1891 to 1959, the SPD theoretically espoused Marxism.
