How voters' perceptions of junior coalition partners depend on the prime minister's position

Recent studies document that voters infer parties' left‐right policy agreement based on governing coalition arrangements. This article extends this research to present theoretical and empirical evidence that European citizens update their perceptions of junior coalition partners' left‐right policies to reflect the policies of the prime minister's party, but that citizens do not reciprocally project junior coalition partners' policies onto the prime minister's party. These findings illuminate the simple rules that citizens employ to infer parties' policy positions, broaden understanding of how citizens perceive coalition governance and imply that ‘niche’ parties, whose electoral appeal depends upon maintaining a distinctive policy profile, assume electoral risks when they enter government.     

Opinion Polls,Coalition Signals and Strategic Voting: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

Recent studies find that defection from one's most preferred party to some other party is as common under proportional representation (PR) as it is in plurality systems. It is less elaborated how election‐specific contextual factors affect strategic vote choice under PR. This study looks at the impact of two potentially important contextual factors: parties’ coalition signals about cooperation with other parties (referred to as ‘pre‐electoral coalitions’) and polling information, which vary from one election to the next. The focus is strategic voting for smaller parties at risk of falling below an electoral threshold. The hypothesis is that parties that are included in well‐defined coalitions will benefit from strategic ‘insurance’ votes if the polls show that they have support slightly below the threshold. However, smaller parties that do not belong to a coalition would be less likely to benefit from insurance votes. Extensive survey experiments with randomized coalition signals and polls give support to the idea that a voter's tendency to cast an insurance vote depends on whether the polls show support below or above the threshold and whether the party is included in a coalition or not.     

Donald Trump's Hijacking of the Republican Party in Historical Perspective

Four aspects of Donald Trump's hijack of the Republican party are examined. First, how he used unconventional techniques, usually associated with some ‘reality’ television programmes, to become the leading candidate in the pre‐primary debates. He could thereby develop ‘momentum’ before the primaries began despite his limited support among Republican activists. Second, how his insurgency differed from the party's takeover in 1964 by supporters of Barry Goldwater. Third, how the Republicans have replaced the Democrats since the early 1980s as the party with a less cohesive potential coalition among voters, with the result that internal party relations became more conflictual throughout the period. Finally, that internal conflict has been intensified by two factors in those decades: the prevalence of divided government, which has made it virtually impossible to impose a truly conservative agenda on federal government policy, and the impact of forty years of stagnating real incomes for many middle‐income Americans.     

The valence gap: Economic cycles,perceptions of competence,and the party system

How does the economic cycle matter for political parties and party systems? This article presents a unified theory connecting economic cycles to party behavior and to party system fragmentation. We argue that a key but poorly studied determinant of party system performance is the difference in perceived competence among parties. The narrowing of differences in parties' valence stock, or the ‘valence gap’, has the effect of increasing the weight voters assign to parties' ideological positions and, in turn, increases the number of parties in the system. Analyses of German public opinion from 1990 to 2007 and of cross-sectional analysis of party valence characteristics from nine countries provides evidence in support of our claims. Overall, study findings show how economic growth and decline work through differences in parties' valence to shape the behavior of party systems.     

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.     

When,How and Why Are Junior Coalition Parties Able to Affect a Government's Foreign Policy? A Study of Swedish Coalition Governments 2006–2014

Junior partners in a coalition government are torn between an eagerness to profile themselves, and to show loyalty to the coalition. We investigate when, how and why junior coalition parties affect foreign policy and profile themselves despite demands for national unity. We study two Swedish centre‐right governments in 2006–2010 and 2010–2014. The parties' foreign policy positions in election manifestos are compared to the foreign policy positions presented in the joint Alliance manifesto and yearly government declarations. An explorative analysis of possible explanations for junior parties' influence is based on elite interviews. The results indicate that junior coalition parties might influence the foreign policy in symbolic value related issues, but less so in issues with real policy implications. Our analysis reveals the importance of the leading member of the coalition and how junior parties converge over time towards the position of the senior coalition member.     

How do coalition signals shape voting behavior? Revealing the mediating role of coalition expectations

Existing empirical research suggests that there are two mechanisms through which pre-electoral coalition signals shape voting behavior. According to these, coalition signals both shift the perceived ideological positions of parties and prime coalition considerations at the cost of party considerations. The work at hand is the first to test another possibility of how coalition signals affect voting. This coalition expectation mechanism claims that coalition signals affect voting decisions by changing voters' expectations about which coalitions are likely to form after the election. Moreover, this paper provides the first integrative overview of all three mechanisms that link coalition signals and individual voting behavior. Results from a survey experiment conducted during Sweden's 2018 general election suggest that the coalition expectation mechanism can indeed be at work. By showing how parties' pre-electoral coalition behavior enter a voter's decision calculus, the paper provides important insights for the literature on strategic voting theories in proportional systems.     

Policy,office and votes: An experimental investigation of the dynamic aspect of party goals

Political parties face hard choices when balancing desires to influence public policy, to gain executive office and to win votes. The existing literature examining such party preferences has traditionally focused on rather static aspects of the parties, such as size, policy positions and the level of intraparty democracy. This article argues that party actors' sophisticated estimations of whether to enter into coalition can be affected by fluctuating public opinion, thereby having a more dynamic aspect. Drawing on a survey experiment on youth politicians in Norway, we test how perceived standing in the polls affects how politicians weigh up policy versus office and votes versus office. The experimental effect of perceived standings was investigated in addition to the respondents' positions within the party, as well as their parties' former governing history, political orientation and size. Results show that, in the presence of the treatment condition (party is perceived to do well in the polls), the preference for policy over office is lessened. We find no experimental effect for vote versus office. These results advance our understanding of the dynamic aspects of party goals and coalition formation.     

Changing Ideas: Organised Capitalism and the German Left

What determines party positions on issues of economic governance? Most previous research has pointed either to the presumed material interests of the parties' clienteles, or to the political institutions that shape electoral competition. Both approaches do well in explaining cross-national variation, but neither can adequately account for changes over time. This article documents German Social Democrats' policy preferences and the underlying discourse on organised capitalism from 1880 onward to highlight the crucial role of historical context. The interests reflected in party positions cannot simply be read off the material environment. Instead, as suggested by constructivist work on preference formation, they depend on theories regarding the causal effect of alterative policy measures. Following Peter Hall, we treat the evolution of such theories as a ‘process structured in space and time’, by illustrating how ‘context factors’ affect the relative salience of the multiple considerations pertaining to organised capital.     

Regierungsbildung im deutschen Fünf-Parteiensystem

Since 2005 all five parliamentary parties in the German Bundestag have coalition potential in the sense that they are able to enter at least one minimal winning coalition, that is a coalition without parties which are not necessary for a majority. Given the number of each party’s members of parliament, the strategic coalition situation is fixed as the set of possible minimal winning coalitions. With certain assumptions (no party will gain an absolute majority, the party system consists of two larger and three smaller parties etc.) two strategic coalition situations are possible as a consequence of the Bundestag election in September 2009: the same as the existing one where only CDU/CSU and SPD can form a two party majority government, and an alternative, predicted currently (February/March 2009) by pollsters, where the largest party, probably the CDU/CSU, can form a two party majority coalition also with the third largest party, probably the FDP. In addition, several three party coalitions are also possible. Which of these coalitions will actually be formed will be determined by the policy distances between the parties which are identified in a two dimensional policy space (economic and social issue positions of parties). The possible minimal winning coalitions are further constrained by the majority coalitions in the so-called cycle set as defined by Schofield.     

Towards an organisational perspective on party funding: Explaining financial transfers from MEPs to their national parties

Which parties represented in the European Parliament (EP) are able to extract regular donations from their MEPs' salaries and, if they extract donations, how great are they? In the literature on party finances, there has been a lack of attention paid to the use of salaries of elected representatives as a source of funding. This is surprising given that the national headquarters of many parties in Europe regularly collect ‘party taxes’: a fixed (and often significant) share of their elected representatives' salaries. In filling this gap, this article theoretically specifies two sets of party characteristics that account for the presence of a taxing rule and the level of the tax, respectively. The presence of a tax depends on the basic ‘acceptability’ of such an internal obligation that rests on a mutually beneficial financial exchange between parties' campaign finance contributions to their MEPs and MEPs' salary donations to their parties. The level of the tax, in contrast, depends on the level of intra‐organisational compliance costs and parties' capacity to cope with these costs. Three factors are relevant to this second stage: MEPs' ideological position, the size of the parliamentary group and party control over candidate nomination. The framework is tested through a selection model applied to a unique dataset covering the taxing practices in parties across the European Union Member States.     

Estimating parties' left-right positions: Determinants of voters' perceptions' proximity to party ideology

The article aims to explore whether the accuracy of voters' perceptions of party ideology are affected by party position shifts and by the media's turn to non-left-right issues, such as political leadership, during election campaigns. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and a country-specific left-right index based on data by the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP), multilevel analyses reveal that emphasizing leadership issues can lead voters to reflect left-right positions more accurately. A party's left-right position shift between elections does not lead to a significant difference in voters' perceptions, while a shift on the economic sub-dimension of left-right ideology can even lead voters to more position clarity. However, multiple parties' shifting their positions seems to overburden respondents' cognitive capacity.     

Ideology matters: Why decentralisation has a differentiated effect on regionalist parties' fortunes in Western democracies

This article addresses the effects of decentralisation reforms on regionalist parties' electoral strength. It takes up the debate between ‘accommodatists’ (i.e., electoral loss due to policy accommodation) and ‘institutionalists’ (i.e., electoral gain due to institutional empowerment). These effects depend on the electoral venue considered – regional or national – and on the ideological radicalism of a given regionalist party – secessionist or autonomist. This study finds that increases in the level of decentralisation are positively associated with higher scores for autonomist parties in regional elections, while they are not statistically significantly correlated with secessionist parties' electoral performances. In contrast, in national elections, decentralisation reforms seem to penalise autonomist parties more than secessionist ones. These findings are based on the analysis of a novel dataset which includes regional and national vote shares for 77 regionalist parties in 11 Western democracies from 1950 until 2010.     

Eurocommunism and the Spanish communists

The DCs development from the mid‐1970s is examined in the light of its overall characteristics as a political party. A sceptical viewpoint is expressed about its prospects for change, in spite of talk of party reform since 1975 under Zaccagnini's secretaryship, if only because the ‘historic compromise’ confirms the DCs governing role even though in a modified policy setting. The main consequence of Moro's death is likely to be an accelerated change in leadership generation rather than a weakening of his ‘strategy’. At the same time, the DC has not yet found an alternative role to replace the political dominance it has lost. The new relationship with the PCI causes some confusion about the party's identity, so that DC leaders tend to view this in a short‐term perspective and to treat it as an empirical rather than ‘historic’ compromise.     

French socialism and the fifth republic

The French Socialist Party's strategic acceptance of presidentialism in the Fifth Republic from 1971 created a relationship within the party which involved its discourse, its organisation, and the treatment of leadership within Socialism. The relationship between these elements changed after 1981 as a result of the party's winning the Presidency and attaining government. In the 1984–86 period, ‘modernisation’ began the adaptation of discourse to the new relationship. The 1987 party congress saw the partial adaptation of organisation. However, the problems encountered in the third area, leadership, after March 1986, demonstrated how problematic the triple relation organisation/discourse/leadership was, and how profound the effects of the Republic have been.     

Political competitition and multiparty coalition governments

Abstract. Many previous theoretical analyses of multiparty coalition behaviour have been based either on a one-dimensional policy model or on a constant-sum game interpretation. For theoretical and empirical reasons this paper focusses on a competitive two-dimensional model. In this model parties are concerned with policy outcomes but choose party positions both with a view to electoral consequences and as a basis for coalition bargaining. The political heart is proposed as the set of possible coalition outcomes. The heart is either the core of the political game or is determined by a small number of party positions. Under certain conditions an equilibrium in the choice of party positions can be shown to exist. The model suggests that parties can be categorized as either strong or weak core parties, anti-core parties or peripheral parties. This categorization of parties implies a typology of party systems, which gives some theoretical foundation for the occurrence of minority, minimal winning and surplus coalitions in many of the European countries in the postwar period.     

Political competition

Abstract Many previous theoretical analyses of multiparty coalition behaviour have been based either on one-dimensional policy model or on a constant-sum game interpretation. For theoretical and empirical reasons this paper focusses on a competitive two-dimensional model. In this model parties are concerned with policy outcomes but choose party positions both with a view to electoral consequences and as a basis for coalition bargaining. The political heart is proposed as the set of possible coalition outcomes. The heart is either the core of the political game or is determined by a small number of party positions. Under certain conditions an equilibrium in the choice of party positions can be shown to exist. The model suggests that parties can be categorized as either strong or weak core parties, anti-core parties or peripheral parties. This categorization of parties implies a typology of party systems, which gives some theoretical foundation for the occurrence of minority, minimal winning and surplus coalitions in many of the European countries in the postwar period.     

Coalition Termination in Norway: Models and Cases

This article focuses on coalition termination in Norway and explores the questions: Which issues are severe enough to bring down a coalition government? To what extent are coalition crises caused by a complex bargaining environment? On the basis of a unified model for government solution, three cases are examined: the termination of Borten II in 1971, Willoch III in 1986, and Syse in 1990. The analysis demonstrates that the complexity of the bargaining environment is conditioned by the dimensionality of the party system. The stability of coalitions is restricted by the cleavage structure and the ideological diversity of the system, as parties are polarized along several conflict dimensions. Terminal issues are fundamentally related to the parties' position in the policy space. In order to preserve party identity and unity, political parties change from a cooperative to a competitive strategy when issues belonging to the “heartland” of the parties concerned become salient.     

Does party rhetoric affect voter perceptions of party positions?

Do voters listen to parties? Do they pay attention to and understand parties' policy messages? We explore these questions with two studies. First, we assembled the most comprehensive cross-national dataset on media coverage of parties' rhetoric during election campaigns and show that parties’ media messages about their left-right positions significantly affect voter perceptions of these positions. We corroborate the cross-national results with panel data from the UK that allow us to more rigorously identify the party rhetoric effect and to show that it extends beyond the left-right super issue: party messages affect voter perceptions also on specific issues, such as income redistribution and European integration. Taken together, these findings suggest that voters indeed listen to parties and understand their policy messages.