Ideology of divided governments

[mvd10]

Cohabitation mostly followed the ideology of the PM. Chirac and Balladur were able to push through right-wing policies during their cohabitation periods and Jospin introduced the 35 hour work week.

In systems like the German or Dutch system you basically negotiate a coalition agreement right after the elections. Either you trade off complete issues or you come up with a compromise on everything. In the Netherlands the centre-right VVD and the Social Democratic PvdA were in government from 2012-2017 and they choose to mostly trade off issues. The PvdA got their way on income redistribution while the VVD got their way on spending cuts, labour market reforms and a stricter immigration policy. When the VVD started complaining about illegal refugees the PvdA basically bought them off with a small tax cut. VVD and PvdA were almost as big, and we always have coalition governments (currently we've been negotiating on a 4 party coalition since March). PvdA dropped from 24% in 2012 to 6% in 2017 btw, the VVD dropped from 27% to 22%. Being a junior partner in a coalition usually means losing a lot of votes the next election, as you're bound to be less visible than the party delivering the PM (and this especially is true for grand coalitions between the centre-right and the centre-left). Even then the PvdA loss was dramatic.

The CDU/CSU-SPD government was pretty even as far as I know, despite CDU/CSU being much bigger than the SPD. The SPD got their way on a lot of social welfare policies including the minimum wage (something CDU/CSU mostly opposed), while CDU/CSU were able to block tax increases on higher earners (something the SPD promised during the 2013 elections).

In the US a divided government currently basically means complete gridlock. In the past it depended on the circumstances, but I'm not really an expert on that.