As they point out, three of the largest countries, plus one other, can block any decision, whereas it takes a big coalition of small countries to achieve such a result.
Mr Serra still has most of Mr Cardoso's big coalition behind him, and so will get the lion's share of the television slots that will be screened from next month.
And since the Texas Governor doesn't have much power, he had no choice but to build a big coalition, work with the Democrats and generally conduct himself in a way that offered a perfect contrast to the eye gouging going on in Washington.
By 2009, President Obama presided over what could fairly be called a big-tent coalition.
The PT now has 79 of the 513 lower-house seats and 10 of 81 in the Senate, and has relied on a big, fractious coalition.
The whole point of front-loading the big reforms the Coalition is pushing through almost wherever you look is so that they are bedded down and delivering visible benefits which voters notice, by the time the next election hoves into sight.
Without making a big fuss, the coalition has already cut some subsidies, such as for homebuyers.
They all say it was a big mistake for the coalition government to slash capital spending shortly after they came to power.
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Air dominance from all the services was another big advantage for the coalition, Shepperd said, as it was in the 1991 war.
But Harmon has one big problem: his coalition did not include many black voters, as Mayor Bosley was quick to point out.
Unipede, a coalition of big European electricity utilities, and the International Energy Agency in October completed a full-fledged simulation of electricity and carbon-dioxide trading.
In Britain, local elections last week saw big losses for the coalition government of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, blamed for unpopular austerity measures.
The Leapfrog Group, a coalition of big corporate health-care purchasers, in 2009 began asking hospitals around the nation to report their rate of early term induced births that weren't medically necessary.
The North Rhine-Westphalian election could also have big implications for the ruling coalition, both at national and at state level.
The lower house, where Mr Berlusconi's coalition has a big majority, was poised to approve the bill this week, until a last-minute opposition amendment, backed by some queasy pro-government deputies, caused it to be sent back to the Senate.
The big question, assuming the coalition runs its course to 2015, is whether the voters will give their verdict on the Liberal Democrats in that General Election and then be prepared to cast their votes the Assembly election in 2016 with more of an open mind than they did five years earlier.
It is almost certain to be approved in the end, as the coalition government has a big majority.
The answer lies with Prithviraj Chavan, chief minister since late 2010 for the Congress party, which heads the national ruling coalition but runs few big states.
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But Eden District Council, a Conservative and Independent Alliance coalition, said the Big Society was costing it little except in terms of council officers' time advising groups.
Despite majorities (at first) in both houses of the legislature, the grand coalition passed just one big-ticket reform in the spirit of Agenda 2010, a gradual rise in the retirement age to 67.
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Over at the Harman Center for the Arts, meanwhile, there was a hipper vibe, with a big bash thrown by the Creative Coalition, an arts advocacy organization, featuring a full concert by the rock band the Goo Goo Dolls.
The NHS row is a big event but an unreliable guide to coalition dynamics, he says.
But the idea has echoes of the spirit of the coalition government's "Big Society" agenda where regulatory barriers are removed to encourage voluntary groups and communities to take action.
The big-box stores are backing a coalition called the Alliance for Main Street Fairness, which is leading efforts to change sales-tax laws in more than a dozen states including Texas and California.
But any corporate tax initiative will run into an odd coalition of resistance: liberal Democrats and big segments of the business community itself.
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The coalition is openly discussing the need for big efficiency savings in the health service and Mr Cameron has pledged to seek powers back from Brussels if the euro-zone crisis reorders the EU's architecture.
Earlier this year, a group of unions called the Change to Win coalition sent letters to a variety of big lenders, including Bank of America (nyse: BAC - news - people ), Citigroup (nyse: C - news - people ), Merrill Lynch (nyse: MER - news - people ), Morgan Stanley (nyse: MS - news - people ), and Wachovia (nyse: WB - news - people ) and WaMu, demanding to know why they hadn't spotted the warning signs in the mortgage markets earlier.
The coalition was formed last month and includes two big Slav and two Albanian parties.
It has a big parliamentary majority, where Welfare was in a shaky coalition.
This is a gamble just like the one he took when making his "big, open and generous" offer to form a coalition in the aftermath of his failure to win the 2010 election outright.
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