Electoral alliance

Labour and Co-operative

An electoral alliance survives to this day between the Labour Party and the Co-operative Party, which fields Labour Co-operative candidates in general elections in several constituencies, and in some local council elections. They have jointly contested elections since the 1927 Cheltenham Agreement. As of the 2017 general election, there are 38 Labour Co-operative MPs, the third-largest political grouping in the Commons (after the Conservative Party and Labour).

SDP–Liberal Alliance

The SDP–Liberal Alliance began in 1981, shortly after the Limehouse Declaration. The Alliance contested the 1983 and 1987 elections, and became defunct in 1988, when the parties merged into the Liberal Democrats. In the first few years of the alliance, Liberals and Social Democrats were very confident it would be a success, David Steel even suggesting that Alliance could form the next government.^[1] Later on, however, the alliance faced difficulty with political and personal clashes between Steel and David Owen, as well as presentation issues (such as contradiction on policy). When the parties merged in 1988, Owen did not join the Liberal Democrats.

TUSC

A socialist coalition comprising RMT, Socialist Party, Solidarity, &c. candidates, the TUSC formed to contest the 2010 general election. The alliance has been consistently electorally unsuccessful, also contesting the 2015 general election, but endorsing Labour in 2017.

Combination of lists

The possibility of combination of party lists for elections existed in the Dutch electoral system between 1973 and June 2017 as a weak form of electoral alliance between two parties. It was abolished in June 2017 after being earlier abandoned for Senate elections.^[2]

In a system of proportional representation not all seats are immediately divided, some seats remain undivided remainder seats. In the Netherlands these are allocated by the D'Hondt method. This method strongly favours larger parties (often smaller parties get no remainder seats, whereas the three largest parties get two each). But if smaller parties form an alliance their votes are added up for the distribution of seats, so this increases their chances of getting one. With a lijstverbinding or kartel two parties can pool their votes in order to gain more remainders seats.

Often these two parties are ideologically related, in the 2003 general elections for example the Socialist Party and GreenLeft formed a lijstverbinding. In the 2004 European elections the social-democratic PvdA and GreenLeft formed a lijstverbinding. The Orthodox Protestant Reformed Political Party and Christian Union also usually form a lijstverbinding.

Common list

In a common list two or more political parties share a list and often have a common political programme for the election. The participating political parties are identifiable for the voters because the names of these parties are mentioned on the voting paper. It is similar to electoral fusion.