The Concept of Political Coalition
A
political coalition denotes a temporary union of two or more social agents or
political parties for the purpose of collectively achieving an outcome or
objective which could not be achieved by any single member acting
independently. According to Bidycet Chakrabarty who studied coalition politics
in India, (a country known for its fragmented party system –a function of the
character of the polity), coalition building processes inherently include both
accretion, the convergence of ideologically heterogeneous parties and
segmentation due to the frequent conflicts and divisions among participating
entities (Forging Power: Coalition Politics in India, 2006).
Coalitions
are associated with parliamentary democracies and they may be formed either
before elections or post-elections, although the later has received more research
attention over the past decades. Two broad views have dominated the studies of
either pre or post-election coalitions. The first of these was more forcefully
advanced by William Riker in his pioneering work, The Theory of Political
Coalitions (1962). Riker argued that the desire for office is the principal
motivating factor that drives political parties to form coalitions and that, as
office provides ‘fixed rewards’, a coalition should not be larger than the
minimal winning size (size principle) to ensure that the rewards of office
(payoffs) are not shared with others whose contribution to winning may be
negligible and whose participation in the coalition may be superfluous (C.
Mershon, The Costs of Coalition, Stanford University Press, 2002). In other
words, a winning coalition in the first place should include only relevant
agents, and the allocation of cabinet portfolios must be limited only to
coalition partners who made significant contributions to the success of the
coalition and not to any other insignificant partners.
The
second set of theories emphasizes the policy motives of political parties. This
approach treats political actors as policy seekers rather than office seekers,
namely that they are more interested in having certain policies implemented
once they enter government. According to this approach, parties coalesce with
others with whom they share policy preferences in a minimum connected winning
coalition. As these parties are connected by policy choices and with less
policy distance among them, there is less likelihood of conflict among
participants unlike under the power or office seeking arrangements (C. Plott,
“A Notion of Equilibrium and its Possibility Under Majority Rule”, American
Economic Review V. 57, 1967).
In
general, all domestic political alliances and coalitions tend to be short-run
arrangements, unlike some strategic international alliances which involve
higher levels of cooperation and longer-term perspectives. Coalitions go through a three-phase life
cycle- formation, management or governance and termination, and what happens in
stage one can have significant effects on the succeeding phases. The quality of
the agreements reached for the formation of any coalition is always crucial.
Carefully crafted coalition agreements are considered permanently binding and
may be altered only with the full consent of the signatories ( Kyle Hyndman and
Debraj Ray, “Coalition Formation with Binding Agreements”, Review of Economic
Studies, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Oct., 2007), pp. 1125-1147). Conventionally, coalition
agreements are duly signed and widely publicized for the general information of
the electorate. In high literate societies this process could include extensive
media coverage and the publication and distribution of copies of the signed
documents. In some instances the coalition agreements may involve multiple
documents each of which deals with some specific aspects of the coalition. For
example, in the case of the Conservative-Liberal Democrats Coalition of 2010 in
Britain, following the general
election of that year which
resulted in a hung parliament, (with no
party emerging with an overall majority in the House of Commons), three
distinct agreements were signed by the two sides, Prime Minister David Cameron
for the Conservative Party and Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats: 1) the
Interim Agreement setting out key policies agreed by the parties, 2) the
Programme for Government Agreement which provided details of the policy
objectives of the coalition and 3) the Coalition Agreement for Stability and
Reform also known as the Procedure Agreement. (R. Hazel et al., The politics of
Coalition: How the Conservative-Liberal Democrats Government Works, Oxford
2012). In spite of this elaborate set of agreements, the coalition could not
avoid a major friction over the Liberal Democrats’ long- standing objective of
replacing the House of Lords with a more democratic voter-chosen chamber, an
idea that was scuppered by the Conservatives even though it was included in the
Coalition Agreement. Apart from this major pressure point, the two parties had
some other serious policy differences during the course of the coalition to the
extent that their leaders had shouting matches, and during one confrontation in
2013 they nearly exchanged blows, as Cameron revealed in his recent book, For
The Record (HarperCollins, 2019).
Although
even the most well conceived coalition agreements do not always guarantee
success, they, however, serve as useful foundational instruments for coalition
building and management. In addition, several other factors are important in
determining the effectiveness of political parties in partnership arrangements.
In their study of local level coalition behavior T. Mizrahi and B. B. Rosenthal
“Complexities of Coalition Building: Leaders’ Successes, Strategies, Struggles,
and Solutions”, Social Work, Vol. 46, No.1 (January 2001) developed a useful
framework for understanding coalitions. The framework comprises four
components: external conditions,
commitment of actors, their contributions, and competence. This framework will
be discussed in some detail and partially applied to the brief analysis of
Coalition 2016 later.
Early
Attempts in Alliance Politics
Alliance
or coalition politics is not entirely new in The Gambia, although earlier
pre-independence relationships between parties were low-key, tactical and
ephemeral and largely involving mutual support pacts whereby one party
supported the candidate of the other in districts it had not fielded candidates
or in areas where the contending candidate of either partner party might have been weak. The earliest such
cooperative arrangement was between the Democratic Party (founded in 1951 by
the Rev. J. C. Faye and the Gambia Muslim Congress formed in 1952 by I.M.
Garba-Jahumpa. These parties forged an alliance, the Democratic Congress
Alliance (DCA), for the first parliamentary elections of 1960; although the two
parties started holding joint meetings in September 1959, they announced the
formation of a “non-sectarian alliance’ on April 7, 1960 – just over a month
before the election in late May. If the objective of the leaders of the
alliance was to effectively counter the dominance of P.S. Njie and his United
Party in Bathurst, they must have been shell-shocked by the results of the election:
Except for the Jollof/Portuguese Town ward won by A. B. Njie, the DCA lost the
rest of the five Bathurst constituencies including those of the alliance
leaders. (Sulayman Nyang, “The Historical Development of Political Parties in
The Gambia”, 1975; D. Perfect and A. Hughes, “Gambian Electoral Politics”, in
A. Saine et al eds., State and Society in The Gambia,Trenton, NJ: Africa World
Press 2012.
Before
the 1962 parliamentary elections, the PPP and DCA also formed a mutual support
pact, with the results confirming the growing PPP influence especially in the
protectorate, winning a total of 18 seats out of the 32 seats for the House
while the DCA could only manage to retain its single Bathurst ward of
Jollof/Portuguese Town. Realizing the unshakable strength of the UP in
Bathurst, Jahumpa renamed his party the Congress Party, perhaps after having
realized that the religious implications that the previous party (Gambia Muslim
Congress) carried were not helpful. After this adjustment, he turned to P. S.
Njie in a United Party/Congress Party alliance for the 1966 election. This time
Jahumpa was able to win his Bathurst seat before breaking away from the UP,
dissolving his party and joining the PPP in 1968.This move earned him important
cabinet positions in the PPP administration, first as Minister of Health and
later as Minister of Finance. According to Nyang (1975), even the PPP and UP
formed a short-lived alliance shortly before independence and Perfect and
Hughes (2012) have also noted the temporary United Party and National
Liberation Party pact of 1977 and the National Convention Party and UP alliance
of 1987; all of these alliance efforts were inconsequential as they had all
failed to make any significant impact on electoral outcomes. Fundamentally, the
pattern of alliance or coalition politics before independence up to the 1980s
centered on transient and near-informal relationship building, without any
long-term strategic considerations or binding agreements. During this period,
most of the smaller or weaker parties found themselves in a quandary and were
looking for any opportunities to enhance their electoral fortunes such as
joining forces with bigger and stronger parties in decidedly asymmetric
partnerships.
K.
M. Bayo
January
02, 2020
To
be continued
