The great advantage of coalition government is that it the partners act as a moderating influence on one another.
Also, you tend not to get 'grand coalitions'. Instead, you get a senior member with enough junior members to create a stable voting bloc. Grand coalitions only happen at times of perceived existential threat or national crisis. The closest thing to to a counterexample I can think of is Austria, but even then, those were to put a cordon sanitaire around far right and far left parties. The very fact that grand coalitions are seen as antidemocratic tends to keep their formation to a minimum.
In reality, countries that have lots of coalitions by virtue of their voting system (such as STV[1]) tend to have perfectly stable governments. It's only in countries whose voting systems tend to give a single party power that have issues with coalitions, because they have no idea how to handle situations like that. Witness the panic in the UK after the 2010 elections - here in Ireland, we were quite entertained by the panic as coalition governments are the norm here.
[1] Ireland, where I'm from, for instance, hasn't had a non-coalition government since the '50s. In that time, we went from being one of the poorest countries in Europe of one of the wealthiest in the world, so obviously our government was able to take some kind of meaningful action in all that time.
>Also, you tend not to get 'grand coalitions'. Instead, you get a senior member with enough junior members to create a stable voting bloc. Grand coalitions only happen at times of perceived existential threat or national crisis. The closest thing to to a counterexample I can think of is Austria, but even then, those were to put a cordon sanitaire around far right and far left parties. The very fact that grand coalitions are seen as antidemocratic tends to keep their formation to a minimum.
This kind of thing is why my ideal system right now is Mixed Member Proportional representation with an approval-vote. Represent small opinions, but strengthen the moderate blocs at the expense of extremist blocs.
I've mixed feelings about MMPR, mainly because it's subject to collusion via decoy lists, party splitting and the like, so it ends up devolving into parallel voting, which is susceptible to gerrymandering of constituencies. It works well in a lot of places (Germany, Scotland, NZ, &c.), but not so well in others (Venezuela, Hungary, &c.).
How would adding approval voting into the mix improve MMPR as you see it? It's an interesting idea for sure, especially as approval voting eliminates the spoiler factor in single seat elections you get in FPTP, and it's simpler than IRV.
The great advantage of coalition government is that it the partners act as a moderating influence on one another.
Also, you tend not to get 'grand coalitions'. Instead, you get a senior member with enough junior members to create a stable voting bloc. Grand coalitions only happen at times of perceived existential threat or national crisis. The closest thing to to a counterexample I can think of is Austria, but even then, those were to put a cordon sanitaire around far right and far left parties. The very fact that grand coalitions are seen as antidemocratic tends to keep their formation to a minimum.
In reality, countries that have lots of coalitions by virtue of their voting system (such as STV[1]) tend to have perfectly stable governments. It's only in countries whose voting systems tend to give a single party power that have issues with coalitions, because they have no idea how to handle situations like that. Witness the panic in the UK after the 2010 elections - here in Ireland, we were quite entertained by the panic as coalition governments are the norm here.
[1] Ireland, where I'm from, for instance, hasn't had a non-coalition government since the '50s. In that time, we went from being one of the poorest countries in Europe of one of the wealthiest in the world, so obviously our government was able to take some kind of meaningful action in all that time.