The Thursday Question 2:23: Minimum winning coalitions
Is it possible to win too many seats? Can you really please most of the people all of the time?
My friend and teacher Tom Flanagan is sometimes tagged in the mainstream media as “controversial” (1). Maybe that’s because Tom is so often out of step with mainstream of academic and media commentary in Canada. Or maybe it’s because the people who tag him in that way don’t like the success of the political leaders he advised. Once upon a time, Tom was director of policy, communications and strategy for Mr. Manning. Later, he ran Mr. Harper’s two leadership campaigns and the 2004 Conservative national election campaign. He also ran a provincial campaign for Danielle Smith. I was around for all of those battles. No Tom, no Harper. No Tom, no Smith. Tom did a lot of winning. Not everyone was happy about it. Fortunately, he wrote several books about his political work (2).
Along the way, Tom popularized in Canadian political strategy the concept of the “minimum winning coalition”. The basic idea is that political parties and election candidates try to win, but not to win too big:
Politicians often speak as if they would like to get everyone's vote, but in fact that would be counterproductive. Voters are attracted into an electoral coalition by persuasion, which includes promises of rewards. The more supporters you have, the more open hands you will face if you do win power, and the more difficulty you will have satisfying the expectations of your coalition members for favourable policies, patronage appointments, and symbolic gratification. Larger-than-necessary winning coalitions have often proved unstable in Canadian politics. For example, Diefenbaker's Conservative coalition won a sweeping victory in 1958, as did Mulroney's coalition in 1984; however, both proved … fragile because the leaders … could not satisfy demands from their Quebec supporters without alienating supporters elsewhere (Flanagan, Winning Power, Ch. 4).
This thinking leads me to wonder if there is another trade-off. For political leaders who want to reform policy, having a bare majority in the House lets them move more quickly and spend less time getting internal buy-in for their policy direction than having a huge majority would. But a leader who wants policy reforms to stick has to create a large enough coalition to ensure they endure. The policy status quo has its own staying power (3) but overturning the status quo in any field of public policy is harder if the policy has widespread support.
We probably have 460-odd days until the next election. That’s about 66 weeks. If a week is a long time in politics, then the next election is many lifetimes away. But as the summer begins, public opinion polls suggest the Conservative Party could win a big majority in the next election – as many as forty seats more than a majority (338canada.com). Recent by-election results have underscored the size of the Conservative lead.
A huge election victory could give a new government an early rush of support and optimism. In 2015, Mr. Trudeau’s 14-seat majority gave his government enough energy to last several months. He used it to overturn the policy status quo on cannabis, taxation, child poverty, and MAID. But he couldn’t stretch that energy it far enough to end the first-past-the-post electoral system. Eventually his government shifted to issues management mode. While his adroit use of political divisions staved off defeat in 2019 and 2021, his government never returned to the “sunny ways” optimism of those first few months. His recent reform of the capital gains tax got no public traction. One wonders if anyone pays attention to any of his reforms any longer.