Proportional voting usually yields parliaments where no party holds a majority of seats. Most European countries have therefore been governed by coalition governments or by minority governments, a practice particularly popular in parts of Scandinavia.
After recent elections, however, government formation has proved increasingly difficult. More fragmented and more polarized parliaments have led to political gridlock, most recently in Israel after the second national election in just six months. In other places, the presence of strong right-wing populist parties has made unusual coalition options more attractive to established parties. In the German states of Saxony and Brandenburg, for example, the far-right AfD came in as the second-strongest parties after the September 1 elections there. Established parties have been negotiating to form coalitions between the center-right CDU, the center-left SPD and the Greens. While such coalitions would leave out more radical parties, they may well prove to be less stable than coalitions between fewer parties. Furthermore, the ideological distance between more parties is likely to be larger.
In Spain, Pedro Sanches, the head of the socialist party who had won national elections in April, failed to form a coalition government and announced elections for November 10. For Spain, this will be the fourth national election in as many years.
Beyond these examples, a bigger question arises: How can democracies ensure that they provide effective governance after an election? After all, a democratic political system is not only legitimized by the transparency and fairness of its procedures but also by its ability to deliver policies that the electorate demands. From that perspective, the inability to form functioning governments that are able to deliver on policies, fragmentation and polarization out democratic legitimacy in jeopardy. An obvious way out would be to reform the electoral system in order to make it less proportional, thereby reducing the number of parties in parliament. However, such a move – if it was possible at all considering that the actors who would have to support a less proportional voting systems are the ones that were brought into positions of power by just such a proportional system – could de-legitimize the political system on the input dimension if important interest would fail to gain representation in parliament in a majoritarian voting system. Furthermore, some political scientists have argued that a proportional voting system is best suited to deal with the challenges of a globalized world.