, and seminar participants at the University of Rochester for their helpful comments on previous drafts, as well as Paul Warwick for sharing his data with us. We also thank Dick Phillips and Lisa Brown at the University Computing Center, University of Rochester, for their programming assistance. All models were estimated using Stata 6.0. The data and program codes are available from the authors at http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~/martin.

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.

The goal of this paper is to empirically establish whether or not changes in the aggregate policy preferences of voters in western democracies are systematically related to national economic performance. I pursue this goal through a time-series, crosssectional regression analysis of data on aggregate policy preferences from 14 western democracies (1956-1989). The results support a hypothesis originally suggested, for the American case, by Robert Durr (1993): when the economy expands aggregate policy preferences move left, but when the economy contracts aggregate policy preferences move right. This finding sustains the normatively appealing conclusion that change in aggregate policy preference reflects the measured response of many individuals to changes in their political environment.

P revious research on coalition politics has found an "incumbency advantage" in government formation, but it has provided no clear explanation as to why this advantage exists. We classify existing theories as either preference-based or institutions-based explanations for why incumbent coalitions might be likely to form again, and we integrate these explanations into a coherent theoretical argument. We also claim that it is possible, to some extent, to distinguish these explanations empirically by taking into account the "historical context" of coalition bargaining. Using a comprehensive new data set on coalition bargaining in Europe, we show that coalitions, in general, are more likely to form if the parties comprising them have worked together in the recent past, and that incumbent coalitions are more likely to re-form if partners have not experienced a severe public conflict while in office together or suffered a recent setback at the polls. The incumbency advantage disappears completely if partners have become mired in conflict or have lost legislative seats (even after accounting for the impact of seat share on coalition size). Moreover, in certain circumstances, institutional rules that grant incumbents an advantage in coalition bargaining greatly enhance their ability to remain in office.

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