Divided government is getting more common:
Democracies everywhere—from the oldest and most mature, to the youngest and least institutionalized—are showing a surprising common feature: It is increasingly rare that a presidential candidate trounces his opponent. Elections won by a landslide are endangered species. They still happen occasionally, but the prevalent trend is that wherever free and fair elections take place, the margins of victory are shrinking. Increasingly, elections are won by a hair.
Today, polarized and fragmented electorates are the norm, and their votes offer no clear mandate or dominant position to any party or candidate. This is why so many countries are governed by complex, cumbersome, and unstable coalitions formed by political groups whose members often have little in common and in some extreme cases are even bitter rivals.
As I have noted elsewhere, in 2012, among the 34 members of the “rich nations club,” the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, only four featured a government that also had an absolute majority in parliament. In India, 35 parties shared seats in the 2009 election; no party has won an absolute majority since 1984. In fact, absolute majorities are globally on the wane. In electoral democracies, minority parties have won on average more than 50 percent of the seats in parliament throughout the postwar period; in 2008, minority parties controlled 55 percent of seats on average. But even in countries that are not deemed democracies, minority parties are increasing their clout. In those countries, minority parties held fewer than 10 percent of seats three decades ago; now their average share has risen to nearly 30 percent.
The Dish 