Do party supporters accept policy compromises in coalition governments?

Government formation in multi-party systems often requires coalition negotiations and finding common ground among coalition partners. Supporters of parties involved in the government formation process face a trade-off when evaluating such bargaining processes: on the one hand, voters usually prefer seeing their party being in government rather than in opposition; on the other hand, negotiations require coalition compromises that they might dislike. In this paper, we study voters’ willingness to accept policy compromises during government formation processes. We argue that voters’ acceptance of policy compromises depends on both the strength of their party attachment and the importance they assign to the issue at stake during the coalition negotiations. Not giving in on important issues is key, especially for supporters of challenger parties, who hold strong policy preferences on a selected number of issues. To test these expectations, we collected original survey data immediately after the Spanish general election in November 2019. The results show support for the hypothesized effects, shed light on the pressure potential coalition partners face during government formation and help explain the failures of government formation attempts in increasingly polarized societies.     

Who would vote NOTA? Explaining a ‘none of the above’ choice in eight countries

In this study, we investigate who would vote ‘none of the above’ (NOTA) if this were available on the ballot paper using original data from eight European countries. In particular, we examine whether NOTA would be used by abstainers and voters to protest within the electoral process. We also test whether socioeconomic factors and specific and diffuse support for democracy and its institutions correlate with a NOTA vote. We find that having NOTA on the ballot would reduce invalid balloting more than abstention and much more than protest party voting. Our results also suggest that NOTA is related to socioeconomic status, political interest, political knowledge and distrust in political institutions and authorities, but not to broadly undemocratic attitudes. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the increasingly large amounts of abstention and invalid voting, as well as the growing distrust of political institutions, in democratic countries. They also hold lessons for electoral reformers.     

Who's to blame? How performance evaluation and partisanship influence responsibility attribution in grand coalition governments

This article examines a neglected but fundamental facet of electoral accountability: responsibility attribution under grand coalition governments. Contrary to much of the existing literature that focuses on retrospective voting, this article focuses on responsibility attribution testing the effect of perceived performance of the government and partisan attachments for parties in grand coalition governments. Novel survey questions on responsibility attribution from Austria and Germany show that when the lines of responsibility are blurred, partisanship functions as an important heuristic for all voters including supporters of opposition parties. These findings have important implications for our understanding of electoral accountability and political representation in grand coalition governments.     

Do people want a ‘fairer’ electoral system? An experimental study in four countries

When judging how ‘fair’ voting rules are, a fundamental criterion used by both scholars and politicians is their ability or inability to produce proportional results – that is, the extent parties’ seat distribution after the elections accurately reflects their vote shares. How about citizens? Do citizens care about how proportional the outcome is? Or do they judge the outcome solely on the basis of how well (or poorly) their party performed? Taking advantage of a uniquely designed survey experiment, this article investigates the causal effect of proportionality on voter support for voting rules in four countries: Austria, England, Ireland and Sweden. The results show that proportionality drives support for the voting rules not above, but beyond party performance. There is little cross-country variation, which suggests that proportionality is appreciated in different contexts with little status quo bias. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the causal mechanisms linking electoral rules to voter support.