In 1974, when Harold Wilson formed the UK’s first minority government in 45 years, observers like Anthony King optimistically claimed that “[m]inority rule can work”. This challenges the oft-cited view of Strøm that minority governments are “counterintuitive phenomen[a] in the world of parliamentary democracy”. Today, minority governments constitute approximately one third of governments in established parliamentary democracies, globally. This ‘counterintuitive’ statistic raises the following questions: When can minority rule work? Under which conditions are minority cabinets effective? How have minority rule governments evolved over time? To answer these questions, I focus on three cases – Sweden, Norway, and Denmark – where minority cabinets are the predominant form of government. Ultimately, I argue that existing measures to assess the performance of …