Tim Bale and Torbjörn Bergman, "A Taste of Honey Is Worse Than None at AlL? Coping with the Generic Challenges of Support Party Status in Sweden and New Zealand," Party Politics, 12 (March, 2006), 189-209.

First Paragraph:
Before the pioneering work of Kaare Strøm (1990), the frequency of minority governments was seen as a puzzle. In the context of the scholarly work on government formation that has followed, however, the support parties that so often underpin such governments are still under-researched (see De Winter (2002) on the 'state of the art' in coalition theory). This is understandable. Most scholars interested in coalitions are interested in government formation: support parties, ipso facto, are not part of such governments. Furthermore, the coalition literature suffers from:

. . . one of the traditional Hollywood biases: much more attention has been given to identifying the right match, and to the process of courtship, than to the actual process of sharing a life . . . and working out the concomitant issues. (Müller and Strøm, 1999: 590)

Support parties do most of their work after the match is made and suffer from scholarly neglect as a result

Figures and Tables:
Table 1. Recent elections and governments in Sweden and New Zealand

Last Paragraph:
Further research in other countries and with other types of parties is needed, however, before we can be certain that the experiences of the Greens in Sweden and New Zealand are generic to any parties given the chance to support, rather than to join, more established and/or bigger parties in government.