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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.

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There is abundant research on how social cleavages shape political preferences in developed countries with uninterrupted democracies, but we know less about this topic for middle income countries with recently restored democracies. In this analysis of the Chilean case, we examine with Latinobarometer survey data from 1995 to 2009 the evolution of social cleavages as shapers of political preferences (measured with a left–right self-placement scale). We find a general process of dealignment across time, indicated by the decreasing association between political preferences on the one hand, and class, religion and regime preferences on the other. We tentatively link dealignment at the mass level to the strategies pursued by political parties operating in a political and economic context that encourages ideological moderation and convergence to the centre. These strategies weaken the differentiated signals needed for sustaining an aligned citizenry.

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Using Latinobarometer survey data, we study the evolution of religious identities among the adult populations of 17 Latin American countries between 1996 and 2013. We find several interesting patterns. First, the current religious landscape is highly dynamic and is becoming increasingly pluralist among a majority of countries. Changes derive not only from the growth of Evangelicals, as commonly assumed, but also from the sharp rise in irreligious individuals. Second, religious change cannot be convincingly explained by important theories such as secularization, religious economies, and anomie. However, the predictions derived from anomie theory seem more useful for understanding Evangelical growth. Finally, our cohort analysis indicates that aggregate religious change largely results from individual-level change across time-religious conversion and apostasy-rather than from generational replacement. Still, there are interesting variations across countries in that respect.

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Por medio de un análisis de edad-período-cohorte, aplicado a datos de encuestas realizadas entre 1994 y 2015, buscamos comprender el declive de la participación electoral ocurrido en Chile durante la actual era democrática. Nuestro análisis confirma algunas hipótesis previas, pero también ilumina algunas nuevas tendencias. Primero, encontramos efectos de cohorte que indican que las generaciones que votaron durante el plebiscito de 1988 tienden a sufragar más que aquellas que se volvieron elegibles en democracia. Segundo, la propensión a votar de los chilenos aumenta con el envejecimiento, aunque este efecto es mucho más pronunciado entre las cohortes nacidas después de 1970. Por último, hallamos un marcado y negativo efecto período de carácter lineal, que implica un declive universal en la propensión a concurrir a las urnas de todos los grupos etarios.