Talking It Through

When there is a voting system in place that has continuously resulted in a situation in which one of two traditional major parties has been able to secure enough seats to form a government, change to this puts all participants in a new situation. In the United Kingdom, the term “hung parliament” refers to a situation in which the first-past-the-post voting method fails to provide any single party with the needed majority. As the country needs a stable government in order to have votes of confidence to handle everyday business and lead the country, the party with the most seats can either form a coalition government together with junior partner, as happened in the UK in 2010, or form a government with the support of another party without a formal coalition agreement, as happened in 2015. The former option in particular requires negotiations to reach an agreement and work in order to have the government survive the length of the entire parliament, and it is on this that Judi Atkins’ Conflict, Co-operation and the Rhetoric of Coalition Government focuses. The period of the book, namely 2010–2015 is promising and also affords a brief view of the subsequent general elections of 2015, when the Conservative Party formed a government supported by the small Northern Ireland DUP without a formal coalition agreement. The coalition between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats, formed in 2010, offered the latter party its best chance to rise to power and to implement its much-desired electoral reform, but at the same time establishing the coalition subjected the junior partner to strain from a numerically larger and ideologically different governing partner. Dividing her book into eight chapters, Atkins aims to afford her readers a view of the rhetorical aspects of coalition life, a task she accomplishes by restricting her analysis to the rhetorical identification strategies of key politicians such as Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, and to some contributions from both backbenchers and other frontbenchers. As her starting point, Atkins utilizes Kenneth Burke’s theory of rhetoric as identification in order to illustrate how attention is directed in a particular situation to some aspects rather than others. Her book approaches the coalition politics by means of a thematic division that seems to benefit the analysis. Simultaneously, author does not systematically engage at great length with the exhausting corpora of coalition, but focuses on some particular fo-