Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
candidates might withdraw to shore-up electoral support for the centre-left and
centre-right candidates respectively. With five seats up for grabs, however, the more
extreme candidates are more likely to stay in the contest.
In elections for the ACT Legislative Assembly, voters elect five representatives
in each of the five divisions. The legislature is comprised of 25 representatives,
withanypartythatcancontrolamajorityofmembersgiventherighttoforma
government. In the 2016 election, two divisions elected three ALP members and
two Liberal members. One division elected three Liberal members and two ALP
members. The other two divisions each elected two ALP members, two Liberal
members, and one Greens member.
The final distribution of seats was 12 to the ALP, 11 to the Liberals and two to
the Greens. Accordingly, neither major party was able to form a government in its
ownright,asneitherhadaclearmajorityofseatsintheAssembly.Threeplausible
outcomesmighthavefollowed.First–andleastlikely,basedonhistoricaltrends
– the two major parties could have formed a coalition to govern together, with a
23totwoseatmajorityovertheoppositionGreensparty.Second,thetwoGreens
memberscouldhavejoinedthe11Liberalstoforma13to12seatmajorityoverthe
opposition ALP.
Finally, and most likely given their ideological positions, the two Greens
memberscouldjointhe12ALPmemberstoforma14to11majorityoverthe
opposition Liberals. This is precisely what happened, with the Greens and ALP
leaders signing a formal pact to ensure the stability of the coalition government.
The Greens promised to only support any motion of no confidence against the ALPled
government in the case of misconduct or corruption, and the Greens’ leader
was rewarded with a ministerial appointment. Similar ALP–Greens coalitions have
governed in Tasmania, which uses an identical electoral system to the ACT.
This kind of electoral outcome, in which no one party wins a clear majority of
seats, and government formation, in which two or more parties must work together
toformamajoritycoalition,iscommonthroughoutmuchofthedemocraticworld.
Further, it often occurs on a much larger scale. In the 2017 German federal election,
no party won a majority of seats in its own right. Incumbent Chancellor Angela
Merkel’s centre-right Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands/Christlich-
Soziale Union in Bayern (CDU/CSU) party won the most seats (246 of 709), while
the left-wing Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) won the second most
(153 of 709). The third most successful party, with 94 seats, was the far right
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
Initially, the CDU/CSU attempted to negotiate a coalition agreement with two
much smaller parties, the semi-libertarian Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP) and
the left-wing (but environmentally focused) Bündnis 90/Die Grünen (Greens).
Negotiations failed when the three parties could not agree on immigration and
energy policy positions. Eventually, the CDU/CSU and SPD formed a ‘grand
coalition’ (the term used to describe the two largest parties governing together),
with 504 of the Bundestag’s 709 seats. This was the third time in the Merkel
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