Majorities vs Minorities: Which kinds of Parliaments are more productive?

Political scientist Richard Conley takes a look at legislative activity in Canada’s House of Commons since 1953 with a view towards trying to determine if majority or minority governments really make a difference in terms of a Parliament’s ‘productivity’. He finds they do but, if I read his piece correctly, ‘productivity’ for Conley is really only a measure of the amount of legislation that gets passed by an particularly Parliament.

Conley does not do a qualitative analysis in assessing which is better — minority or majority — but does provide some anecdotal reference to what, 50 year later at least, look like the very productive minority governments led by Lester Pearson and the relatively hamstrung, unproductive minority governments led by Paul Martin and Stephen Harper from 2004 through to 2011.

Minority government is not inconsequential. Analysis of governmental success rates and legislative productivity provides some indirect evidence that the advent of greater partisanship is at least partially the cause of recent minority governments’ woes. Martin and Harper, in particular, found it much harder to forge consensus with opposition parties compared, for example, to the more quiescent minority governments of Lester Pearson. In describing “exit interviews” with 65 departing members of the House, Paperny (2011) reports that “Almost to a person, they felt stymied by their parties’ machinations—from partisan gamesmanship to opaque candidate nomination processes to the seemingly arbi- trary allocation of plum seats in the House of Commons, office space on Parliament Hill and positions on key committees.” Question period has become focused largely on ethics and scandals (Conley 2011), and these dynamics have intersected with increased rancor in legislative debates to the point of bringing down Harper’s government in 2011 over a charge of “contempt of Parliament”—a first in Canadian history.

There’s also a couple of fun little data nuggets in Conley’s piece:

In fact, since 1953—the starting point for this analysis—the Senate has rejected a total of seven bills. And of the hundreds of bills passed each session by the House of Commons, the Senate has historically amended, on average, less than five percent.

Few private members’ public bills are successful in the House of Commons. Of the 7996 private member public bills introduced from 1953–2009, only 162 (2 percent) passed.