> There's also an issue with that system: it gives a ruling party an easy excuse for not keeping their promises to their voters. You can always say: "We tried,

> There's also an issue with that system: it gives a ruling party an easy excuse for not keeping their promises to their voters. You can always say: "We tried, but we didn't have a majority and our allied party was against that".I can't count how many times I heard that being said in my country. Well yes, but since you have more than three parties (I don't know what country you're from, or how many viable parties you have), voters can be less forgiving. I heard somewhere[0] that a market needs at least four somewhat viable players, in the sense that one is a monopoly (bad), but two and three players can still control the market in an undesirable manner. It probably also depends very much on the particulars of the government, how much power the opposition parties still have versus the coalition, if there's multiple Houses and how they interact, etc. Either way, I do believe that having multiple viable parties (and preferably at least four?) is a good thing compared to having only two real contenders. But this is mainly because I'm looking at the UK and US for examples of two-party systems. From both I understand that a very large portion of the voting population are rationally aware that their votes will almost certainly not make any difference whatsoever. If anyone knows about other countries with two-party systems that actually make many voters feel well (or at least fairly) represented, I'm curious to hear about them. [0] I don't have a citation sorry. It was on the news, in the context of the number of mobile network operators in the Netherlands being down to three, due to a merger. And afaik all of them are now multinationals. But not only do I not have a citation, neither can I really say whether the same holds for political parties in a democracy. So take this for what you like :)