Transcending an Ethnic Party System? The Impact of Consociational Governance on Electoral Dynamics and the Party System
by Paul Mitchell
26. See Muller, W. and Strem,K., Coalition Governments in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
27. See Laver and Schofield Multiparty Government, 15
28. Of course this is neither accidental nor in itself a bad thing. O'Leary has correctly argued that: ' The special skill of the designers/negotiators is that they have created strong incentives towards executive power sharing and power division but without requiring parties to have any prior formal coalition agreement - other than the institutional agreement - and without requiring any party to renounce its long run aspirations' (O'Leary 'The British-Irish Agreement of 1998, 7)
29. The offices of the joint first ministers elected on a cross communal basis are intended to provide policy co-ordination and coherence. However, not only was there no agreed coalition policy document prior to formation - t-is is common practice, for example, in Italy and France - but even more unusually there were no inter-party negotiations to determine portfolio allocations. Instead parties simply picked ministries in rotation according to d'Hondt.
30. Even if the APNI, PUP AND NIWC are counted as 'external support' parties for the Executive, their ten votes in the Assembly (combined) are not enough to compensate for the loss of the DUP's twenty votes in a polarising vote.
31. To date, the DUP's participation in executive functions has been partial. In the initial phase of devolution, the party focused on its line ministries and committee work. It avoided direct contact with Sinn Fein's two ministers, boycotted all meetings of the Executive Committee and did not participate in North-South co-operation. The difficulties this caused at Executive Committee level were compounded when devolution was restored in May 2000. Confronted with the alternative of reassuming its two ministerial posts or of relinquishing them and going into opposition within the Assembly, they chose the former course but on the basis that they would rotate the ministries among their Assembly members. This enabled the DUP to maintain its presence within the Executive and, though subject to periodic bouts of ministerial musical chairs, to demonstrate that their Ministers were able and effective custodians of office. In that respect, while not acting as 'all out wreckers' of the Strand One institutions, their actions has made the task of realising joined up government at Executive level that much more elusive.
32. Laver, M. and Shepsle, K> Making and Breaking Governments: Cabinets and Legislatures in Parliamentary Democracies (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 280. However, the Executive is in no sense omnipotent. Its decisions are subject to cross community voting procedures in the Assembly and to a form of committee oversight that is much more powerful than anything in the British or Irish parliamentary tradition.
33. Strand One, point 25 reads 'An individual may be removed from office following a decision of the Assembly taken on a cross community basis if (s)he loses the confidence of the Assembly, voting on a cross community basis for failure to meet his or her responsibilities including, inter alia, those set out in the Pledge of Office. Those who hold office should use only democratic, non violent means, and those who do not should be excluded or removed from office under these provisions' (The Agreement: Agreement Reached in the Multi-Party Negotiations, no date, no place).
34. Two other tactical matters are relevant. First, while abstentions in parliament may be symbolically meaningful, they are not, as is often suggested 'neutral'. Many abstentions - for example Sinn Fein's on the nomination of Trimble and Mallon as first ministers - are strategically equivalent to 'Yes' votes Secondly, the cross community voting arrangements depend upon ethnic self-designation. Under Assembly Standing Orders a party can change its designation only once during any given Assembly's life. Thus, a not unrealistic scenario that has been floated is that some of the 'others' for example, the Women's Coalition - could redesignate as' Unionist' thus increasing the proportion of 'Yes' unionists. A legal, though politically unrealistic, Machiavellian power manoeuvre would be for the SDLP to redesignate as 'Yes unionists' In this scenario the cost of building a decisive winning coalition would most likely be electoral annihilation.
35. See Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict; and his A Democratic South
Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (Berkeley CA; University
of California Press, 1991) |
