PEOPLE in multi-ethnic and/or multi-religious societies must be fed up with this constant and boring talk of the need for a national unity government, in which ethnic/religious interests may have a voice. But ethnic/religious interests will need more than a voice in any political context. Nonetheless, that is not the fundamental point this author wants to make here.

What this author is saying is that placing a few parties together in government, creating a coalition Cabinet, is not necessarily a precondition for national unity. Any government, even without a coalition of different parties, in a multi-ethnic/multi-religious context, may have the capacity to achieve national unity if it governs in the interests of all.

This idea of having different parties forming a government uses merely manifest markers for selecting these parties. For instance, in a multi-ethnic context, you may say that ‘X’ a Chinese party, ‘Y’ an Amerindian party, and ‘Z’ a White party, should all join forces to constitute a coalition cabinet in the interests of ethnic unity.
But this approach has weaknesses, because the selection of parties to form a government in a multi-ethnic or multi-religious context, seems to only consider manifest markers (ethnic make-up or religious make-up) and not latent markers (interests extraneous to the party), which could jeopardise the quest for national unity.
Latent markers are not only within, but among parties. For instance, within each party, say the Chinese party, there may be individuals with interests quite different from the overall Chinese party’s interests, and these same individuals may even have interests that are different from a coalition government’s interests.  But that individual is in the party mainly because he/she is Chinese, which is a manifest marker, without identifying his conflicting interests (a latent marker).
Unidentified, latent markers could compound the problem of a national unity government. Any coalition government may face serious difficulties, and can have a chaotic legislative record, notwithstanding the functioning of a Chief Whip. This complexity and untidy record could happen where there are unidentified latent markers: Where members within their own parties and/or in a coalition government fall into two categories, namely,  politicians who live for politics, and/or politicians who live off politics.
These two categories could nullify party unification, which may be a fundamental precondition to entering any national unity coalition. Therefore, laying of manifest-like souls within each party in any government may be necessary, but not sufficient to create national unity, even with the functioning of a Chief Whip, because of the absence of latent markers. Furthermore, not only coalitions, but also a minority government can be a national unity government.
President Barack Obama has had a minority government since the mid-term election in 2010, and even in his recent re-election to a second term, the minority government persists. Obama’s Democratic Party does not have a majority in the House of Representatives in Congress.
What helped Obama is that most of his fundamental pieces of legislation became law in the first two years of his first term (2009-2010). Apart from Obama giving one or two top posts to the Republican Party, there has been no effort to create any national unity government, some sort of coalition between the Democratic and Republican Parties.
But there is Obama’s Cabinet coalition-building with the Republican opposition, as the fiscal cliff demonstrated. And even with a minority government since 2010, Obama’s record has propelled him into a second term.
Undoubtedly, it is a political good to have a majority government that works in the interests of all. But a government also has to succeed with a minority status, and can succeed and even function as a national unity government, if it governs in the interests of the masses.
A minority government without formal coalitions as in Canada, Denmark, Norway, and now Guyana, provides the government with considerable flexibility in policy formation (Strøm, 1990). But this minority government’s cabinet will have to build numerous ad hoc coalitions with the opposition.
(Strøm (1990) shows how a minority cabinet can use different strategies to construct legislative coalitions, using policy concessions as bargaining chips to create alliances around precise pieces of legislation.
Cabinet coalitions also can happen through ideological similarities between the cabinet and the opposition (Axelrod, 1970). In addition, an unpopular opposition party may support cabinet legislation if it thinks that that support would lead it to good election outcomes (Godbout and Høyland, 2011).
Facing these scenarios, the concept of a national unity government, comprising different parties, becomes a chic; these different parties may constitute a coalition, but not a national unity government for the afore-mentioned reasons.
That is why advocates for a national unity government must identify not only manifest markers, but also latent markers within each party to the coalition to make their proposal realistic. At the endpoint, a national unity government does not necessarily have to be a coalition to govern in the interest of the masses.