The Politics of Coalition

The Politics of Coalition

I

Virtually all parties, except the most narrowly doctrinaire or authoritarian, are coalitions of a sort. In Europe the broad coalitions have developed inside parties which operate within a general ideological, very much a class, alignment for which we have never found, except in pale and ineffective imitation, a corresponding political frame—a Labor party, a Socialist party.

Where most European parties have had a declared ideological underpinning, the coalitions represented i...