The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (43 page)

 
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Closed rules set time limits on debate and restrict the passage of amendments; open rules permit amendment from the floor of the house. In the US Congress the passage of legislation through the House of Representatives is controlled by these rules, which are set by the House Rules Committee.

 
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Workplace where only workers who are the members of a particular trade union can be employed. Closed shops were outlawed in Britain in 1988, and in the United States by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.

 
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Any procedure for limiting or curtailing debate in a legislature, forcing the matter to a vote even when there are members still wanting to speak. One form in the United Kingdom is the
‘guillotine’
resolution which restricts discussion on the remaining clauses of a government bill. Used to save parliamentary time by preventing
filibusters
.

 
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CND
(Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament)

Unilateralist
pressure group set up in 1958, with close links to the Labour Party. CND was founded at a time of public concern over the British Government's drive to maintain an independent nuclear capability, the doctrine of ‘massive retaliation’, and poor relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Although much of the support for CND came from the unaligned middle classes, politically its support came from the Labour left and the trade union movement. At the 1960 Labour Party Conference a motion calling for a unilateralist defence policy was passed, despite the fervent opposition of the leader, Hugh Gaitskell , who condemned CND as ‘pacifists, unilateralists, and fellow travellers’, and swore to ‘fight and fight and fight again to save the party we love’. The unilateralist vote was reversed in 1961. The divisions in the Labour Party were matched by schisms in CND, between the Committee of 100, which called for civil disobedience, and members who favoured constitutional campaigning. Internal disunity led to falling support, and by 1963 the organization was virtually moribund.
The resurgence of CND came with the escalation in nuclear tension between the superpowers at the end of the 1970s. The campaign in the 1980s centred on opposition to the Conservative government's agreement with the United States to replace the existing Polaris nuclear missiles with the Trident system, and to site American cruise missiles in Britain. This led to an upsurge in membership of CND, and demonstrations at the sites chosen as cruise missile bases, most notably at Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, and
Greenham Common
in Berkshire. Again the growth of the unilateralist movement influenced the Labour Party, and again it led to splits in the party. Disagreement about the incorporation of a commitment to unilateral disarmament in the Labour Party programme in 1980 was one of the main reasons for the breakaway of the
SDP
in 1981.
The association of CND with left-wing politics reduced the Labour Party's appeal, and contributed to its electoral failure throughout the 1980s. As relations between the United States and the Soviet Union improved, following the accession of President Gorbachev, concern about the risk from nuclear weapons diminished. A short-term consequence was a boost for the sister organization END (European Nuclear Disarmament), but by the end of the 1980s CND had, again, lost mass support.

 
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Any combination of separate players (such as political parties) to win a voting game. The commonest form of coalition arises where legislation requires a majority to pass, but no one party controls as many as half of the seats in the assembly.
It is traditional in countries where single-party governments are common (such as the UK) for politicians to be suspicious of coalitions. They point out that ahead of an election in which no party wins half of the seats, the voters cannot know what coalition will result from their votes in aggregate and hence may be deprived of information they need in order to decide how to vote. The issue is entangled with the choice of an
electoral system
, because the
plurality
system tends to boost the proportion of seats held by the leading two parties, and hence the likelihood that one of them will form a government unaided; whereas
proportional representation
may increase the number of parties represented, and will decrease the likelihood that one party will win more than half of the seats. One consequence is that in a plurality system, large parties are themselves coalitions of widely differing points of view, so that the problems of coalition games are removed from the floor of the legislature only to surface in the party office.
Coalition theory is the study of which of the available coalitions tends to form. One prediction, derived from the theory of
zero-sum games
, is that, of the possible coalitions, the one which forms a majority with the smallest number of seats ‘to spare’ is the likeliest to form. The reasoning is that the prize—government and the spoils that flow from it—is of fixed size, which it is best to distribute among as few people as possible. The rival prediction is that those coalitions which are ideologically closest are the most likely to form. This seems better supported by the evidence, although it faces a problem in measuring ‘ideological closeness’.