The German grand coalition of 2005–09 and party system change: Catalyst or continuity?

Two times in the last fifty years grand coalitions have altered traditionally bi-polar patterns of German electoral competition, changing the electoral context by making it difficult for voters to endorse anti-incumbent alternatives. How have voters reacted under these circumstances, and were their responses different because of the weakening of partisan attachments in the forty years between the two grand coalitions? This study explores these questions by examining voter behavior in German state elections under the federal grand coalitions of 1966–69 and 2005–09, comparing voters’ responses with long-term trends in German party system development. The second grand coalition saw a continuation of trends in declining turnout and increasing electoral volatility, but in contrast to the first grand coalition there was no surge in support for far-right parties. Such a change may be the result of differences between the party systems in the two period, with voters in unified Germany having many more options for expressing discontent.     

Voter perceptions of coalition policy positions in multiparty systems

A growing body of research shows how voters consider coalition formation and policy compromises at the post-electoral stage when making vote choices. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how voters perceive policy positions of coalition governments. Using new survey data from the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES), we study voter perceptions of coalition policy platforms. We find that voters do in general have reasonable expectations of the coalitions' policy positions. However, partisan beliefs and uncertainty affect how voters perceive coalition positions: in addition to projection biases similar to those for individual party placements, partisans of coalition parties tend to align the position of the coalition with their own party's policy position, especially for those coalitions they prefer the most. In contrast, there is no consistent effect of political knowledge on the voters' uncertainty when evaluating coalition policy positions.     

Coalition-Targeted Duvergerian Voting: How Expectations Affect Voter Choice under Proportional Representation

Inspired by analyses of majoritarian systems, students of consensual polities have analyzed strategic voting due to barriers to party success, namely, district magnitude and threshold. Given the prevalence of coalition governments in proportional systems, we analyze a type of strategic voting seldom studied: how expected coalition composition affects voter choice. We identify Duvergerian behavior by voters targeted at the coalition formation stage. We contend that when voters perceive their preferred party as unlikely to participate in the coalition, they often desert it and instead support the lesser of evils among those they perceive as viable coalition partners. We demonstrate our argument using data on coalition expectations from the 2006 Israeli elections. We find an appreciable albeit differential effect of coalition expectations on voter choice. Importantly, results hold controlling for ideological and coalition preferences. Lastly, we explore a broad cross-national comparison, showing that there is less, not more, proximity voting where coalitions are prevalent.     

On the nature of voters’ coalition preferences

An expanding literature indicates that in multiparty systems with coalition governments, citizens consider the post-electoral bargaining process among parties when casting their vote. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the nature of voters’ coalition preferences. This paper uses data from the Austrian National Election Study to examine the determinants as well as the independence of preferences for coalitions as political object. We find that coalition preferences are strongly informed by spatial considerations; but additional non-ideological factors, such as party and leader preferences, also play a fundamental role. We also find that coalitions enjoy a certain degree of independence from other objects of vote choice and they do not always represent a simple average score on the feeling thermometer of the constituent parties. There are, however, substantial differences among voters, with party identifiers and those with extreme ideology being less likely to consider coalitions as separate entities from their component parties.     

Does anybody notice? How policy positions of coalition parties are perceived by voters

Does governing in coalitions affect how coalition parties’ policy positions are perceived by voters? In this article, the authors seek to understand the relationship between parties’ participation in coalition governments and their perception by voters. Policy positions are an important instrument through which parties compete for the support of voters. However, it is unclear to what extent voters can correctly perceive the positions of parties when they govern together with other coalition partners. It is argued here that because of the blurred lines of responsibility in multiparty cabinets, it is difficult for voters to correctly perceive the positions of coalition parties. What is more, it is expected that the internal functioning of coalition cabinets affects the extent to which coalition parties struggle to get their message out to voters. It is hypothesized in the article that intra‐cabinet conflict is negatively related to misperception. To test their theoretical expectations, the authors combine data on the left‐right policy positions of political parties from the Comparative Manifestos Project with data on how these positions are perceived by voters gathered from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems from 1996 to 2011. The findings shed light on the relationship between party competition and coalition governments, and its implications for political representation.     

Expected utility or learned familiarity? The formation of voters' coalition preferences

In most modern parliamentary democracies, it is unlikely that single party governments will be formed, meaning that a voter's preferred party presumably has to share cabinet offices and negotiate policy compromises in a coalition government. This raises the question of how voters evaluate potential (coalition) governments, especially since recent studies have shown that coalition preferences influence voting behaviour. In this paper, we combine theories of voting behaviour, government formation and political learning to derive expectations regarding the factors that may impact voters' coalition preferences. We test our hypotheses by analysing survey data from the German federal and state levels. The results of a mixed logit regression analysis support our arguments: Voters' coalition preferences not only depend on the perceived policy distance between the positions of voters and the most distant party within combinations of parties, but also on predominant patterns of government formation.     

Do Voters’ Coalition Preferences Affect Government Formation?

Studies on coalition formation assume that political parties have two major goals: they aim to maximise office and policy payoffs. This paper shows that decision-making in the government formation game is also determined by the voters’ coalition preferences. Since the coalition formation process is not a one-shot game, parties have to take the coalition preferences of the electorate into account when they evaluate the utility of potential coalitions. If parties fail to comply with the coalition preferences of voters, they are likely to be penalised in future elections. The argument is tested by an analysis of government formation in the 16 German states between 1990 and 2009. The results support the argument: the formation of coalitions – at least in the German states – is not only determined by office- and policy-seeking behaviour of political parties, but also by the preferences of voters regarding their preferred outcome of the coalition game.     

Coalition politics and accountability

The paper introduces the possibility of coalition government into the theoretical study of political accountability and analyzes the accountability of coalitions as a problem of team production. It is shown that coalition governments can be held accountable in the presence of an electoral alternative. Accountability becomes problematic if it is certain that at least one of the coalition parties stays in power after the elections. Such a coalition (sometimes called a ‘unity government’) can not be given appropriate collective incentives. To incentivate government performance, voters make one coalition party responsible for the outcome. This, however, makes the other coalition party interested in sabotage. The paper analyzes the resulting conflict and characterizes optimal voter strategy.     

Voters' party preferences in multiparty systems and their coalitional and spatial implications: Germany after unification

How should party preferences of voters in a multiparty system be measured, compared and aggregated? We use city block metric of distances between the pairwise comparisons of the five German parties (1995 survey data for West and East Germany). Neither in West nor in East Germany, a party gains the absolute majority of voters' preferences. We derive coalition preferences from the party rankings; the governing coalition of CDU/CSU and FDP is not the winner, compared with other feasible coalitions of the German party system. But the party rankings of the CDU/CSU-FDP coalition leaners are more homogeneous than other groups of coalition leaners. In the second part of the article, we analyze the common structure of all consistent party rankings. Do voters apply the same criteria to evaluate the political parties? Although only a slight majority of individual rankings fit the often used ideological left-right scale, there does not exist a competing one-dimensional order of the parties that would capture more voters. The joint scale of individual party rankings is interpreted as the collective order which facilitates political orientation of voters. This collective order is more pronounced in West than in East Germany where individuals are almost as consistent in their party rankings but where the rankings fit the collective order less well than in West Germany.

     

Why can voters anticipate post-election coalition formation likelihoods?

A number of scholars have argued that, in contexts with multi-party governing coalitions, voters can use historical patterns to anticipate the ideological composition of likely post-election coalitions and make vote choices accordingly. In this paper we analyze historical coalition formation data from the period 1960–2007 in order to determine whether the historical regularities in the party composition of coalition governments are such that voters can use this information to assess the likelihood that different coalitions would form after an election. Specifically, we examine: (1) the likelihood of party pairs joining a coalition; (2) the likelihood of different coalition permutations; and (3) the likelihood of a party occupying the Prime Ministership.     

Should I stay or should I go? An experimental study on voter responses to pre-electoral coalitions

Abstract.  Pre-electoral coalitions (PECs) are one of the most often used methods to coordinate entry into the electoral market. Party elites, however, do not know how voters will respond to the coalition formation at the polls. In this article, the authors report on an experimental study among 1,255 Belgian students. In order to study voter responses to the formation of PECs, respondents were presented with two ballots: one with individual parties (party vote condition) and one with coalitions (coalition vote condition). The aim of this experiment is to predict under what conditions party supporters will follow their initially preferred party into the coalition and vote for the PEC, and under what conditions they would desert the PEC at the polls. The decision whether to follow the coalition or not can be traced back to four considerations: dislike of the coalition partner; ideological congruence between coalition partners; size of the initially preferred party; and being attracted to a specific high-profile candidate. (Dis)liking the coalition partner is independent from the ideological congruence between the two coalition partners. The study's results also show support for an adjustment effect, as respondents became more loyal toward cartels over the course of the 2003–2005 observation period.     

How do voters react when their party forms a coalition they dislike?

Abstract

While coalitions are conventionally seen as opportunities for parties to realise their policy preferences or to secure their control over political offices, recent studies show that citizens have preferences for coalitions which influence their vote choice. However, these studies do not consider how party and coalition preferences influence each other. This study uses panel data from the German Longitudinal Election Study from the 2009, 2013 and 2017 German elections to determine whether voters punish the party for which they voted for being in a coalition they dislike or, alternatively, whether they become more supportive of that coalition. We find weak evidence for the former but strong evidence for the latter.     

Perceptions of Partisan Ideologies: The Effect of Coalition Participation

Recent scholarship in comparative political behavior has begun to address how voters in coalitional systems manage the complexity of those environments. We contribute to this emerging literature by asking how voters update their perceptions of the policy positions of political parties that participate in coalition cabinets. In contrast to previous work on the sources of voter perceptions of party ideology in parliamentary systems, which has asked how voters respond to changes in party manifestos (i.e., promises), we argue that in updating their perceptions, voters will give more weight to observable actions than to promises. Further, coalition participation is an easily observed party action that voters use as a heuristic to infer the direction of policy change in the absence of detailed information about parties’ legislative records. Specifically, we propose that all voters should perceive parties in coalition cabinets as more ideologically similar, but that this tendency will be muted for more politically interested voters (who have greater access to countervailing messages from parties). Using an individual‐level data set constructed from 54 electoral surveys in 18 European countries, we find robust support for these propositions.     

What voters want from their parties: Testing the promise-keeping assumption

How should party governments make representative democracy? Much of the democracy representation literature assumes that voters prefer parties to fulfill the promises of their election campaigns, with higher preference for promise-keeping placed on the party a voter supports. That voters agree with these assumptions, however, remains largely unclear and this is the main hypothesis of this article. Within the context of Australia, this article investigates voter preferences regarding three ideal party representative styles: promise-keeping, focus on public opinion, and seeking the common good. Furthermore, it tests whether voters prefer their party – over other parties – to keep their promises. Based on novel and innovative survey data, this study finds that, generally, voters care least about parties keeping their promises and their preferences are unaffected by their party support. These results, if confirmed in other contexts, not only challenge the primacy of promise-keeping, but also the assumed ubiquitous party effect.     

Coalition government and electoral accountability

Single-party governments are commonly thought to be more clearly responsible for government policy than coalition governments. One particular problem for voters evaluating coalition governments is how to assess whether all parties within a coalition should be held equally responsible for past performance. As a result, it is generally argued that voters are less likely to hold coalition governments to account for past performance. This article uses data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project to assess whether and how the composition of coalition governments affects the way in which people use their votes to hold governments to account, and which parties within coalitions are more likely to be held to account for the government’s past performance.     

Regierungsbildung in Mehrebenensystemen: Zur Erklärung der Koalitionsbildung in den deutschen Bundesländern

The German federal governmental system is conceptualized as a full-fledged two-level system, in which the Länder governments participate in federal policy decisions via the second chamber Bundesrat and in which the stakes of state coalition building are high for the federal parties. Our research question is whether we can find systematic empirical evidence for an influence of federal on state parties to build state governments whose party composition is concordant with federal politics, containing either exclusively federal governmental or non-governmental parties. We answer this question by indirect evidence. We show that such concordant majority coalitions occur above average even if important coalition predictors are controlled as minimal winning coalitions or participation of dominant and/or central players. We predict the 182 actual Land governments which were formed in the period from 1949 to 2003 compared to the possible governments in each situation.     

Pre-electoral coalitions in comparative perspective: A test of existing hypotheses

Despite the vast coalition literature, pre-electoral coalitions have never been at the center of any systematic, cross-national research. Given their prevalence and potential impact on government composition and policies, this represents a serious omission in our knowledge of coalitions. I begin to remedy this situation by testing two hypotheses found in the literature on party coalitions. The first is that pre-electoral coalitions are more likely to form in disproportional systems if there are a sufficiently large number of parties. The second is that pre-electoral coalitions are more likely to form if voters face high uncertainty about the identity of future governments. These hypotheses are tested using a new dataset comprising legislative elections in 22 advanced industrialized countries between 1946 and 1998. The results of the statistical analysis support the first hypothesis, but not the second.     

Policy signals and strategic voting for minor parties: Evidence from Germany

How does executive power-sharing in multiparty democracies influence voter decision-making? The current scholarship has identified two strategies that voters use to target coalitions and that involve voting for a minor party: Coalition insurance voting and compensatory voting. Yet these strategies are not differentiated conceptually, and empirically, are observationally equivalent. By foregrounding the role of policy signals in strategic voting for minor parties, the present study disentangles these strategies at the theoretical and empirical levels. It also proposes a new, hybrid, strategy. To do so, it uses data on the 2013 and 2017 German federal elections from campaign-period surveys, polls and an original dataset of the candidates’ tweets about policy issues. The results show evidence of policy-driven voters using a hybrid strategy in 2013 and a compensatory strategy in 2017. There is no evidence of coalition insurance voting in these elections.     

Rationales Wählen als Reaktion auf Koalitionssignale am Beispiel der Bundestagswahl 2005

This article extends the calculus of rational voting (Riker/Ordeshook 1968) by considering the coalition building process and the legislative process (cf. Austen-Smith/Banks 1988) in multi-party systems. Comparing coalition preferences and their resulting legislative outcomes instead of party preferences, I elaborate preference profiles of voters on coalitions and estimate the probability that a coalition forms, given the parties’ coalition signals and an expected electoral result. I show the results of this rational calculus for the German Bundestag elections 2005 as a political map. Further, this calculus allows the identification of coalition signals that increase and those that reduce a party’s vote share.     

Elektorale Responsivität als Kriterium zur Beurteilung des deutschen Bundestagswahlrechts

We argue that plurality systems strengthen the accountability of governments towards the electorate while proportional systems lead to a broad representation of voter interests in parliament and coalition governments. We demonstrate these effects in an analysis of all German federal elections from 1949 to 2017 using first-tier votes and directly elected deputies as reflecting the plurality segment and second-tier votes and the seat shares of parties as reflecting the proportional representation segment. We show that the percentages of directly elected deputies react more to differences in perceived party competences (party valences) than the percentages of all party deputies. Electoral system reforms should take into account the effects of both parts of the German electoral system.